Two New Agatha Christie Stories Found

The Guardian reported today that two previously unpublished Hercule Poirot short stories have emerged from family papers at Agatha Christie's favorite home at Greenway in Devon.

Agatha Christie often wrote short stories and later worked out details to make them into full-length novels. The first story, The Mystery of the Dog's Ball, eventually became the 1937 novel Dumb Witness. The title of the other story is The Capture of Cerberus.

These stories will appear in Agatha Christie's Secret Notebooks: Fifty Years of Mysteries in the Making to be published by HarperCollins in September, by John Curran. Curran, 'one of her biggest fans, ' taught himself how to decipher her handwriting and notes. The book includes notes for the novels, a draft play and deleted scenes and alternative endings. It also reproduces many pages from the notebooks and sketches of room plans and villages, including Miss Marple's St. Mary Mead.