The Ending in the Safe
Notes from beside an ending I’m still writing toward.
I know how several of my series end. I could really use some of that information about what happens in the middle.
Today’s literary fact made me feel a little less strange about this.
During World War II, Agatha Christie wrote Poirot’s final case, Curtain, in case she died in the bombings. It was for her daughter. She put the manuscript in a bank vault, kept writing, and let readers have the ending more than thirty years later, in 1975.
Think about all the Poirot books between those two dates. Readers opened them wondering what he might do next. Christie already knew what he would do last.
I have manuscripts in every possible stage of existence. Sometimes the ending arrives first. Sometimes I write a line that belongs in book three while book one is still arguing with me. I don’t have a completed final novel in a vault, but I know what it’s like to carry an ending while the rest of the story is still finding its way there.
Christie lived to see Curtain published. I keep thinking about what it must have felt like to carry Poirot’s last case for more than thirty years, then watch readers finally reach the ending she’d known all along.
I know how some of my series end. I wonder what it will feel like when everyone else knows, too.
Further reading: Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case — Agatha Christie’s official site