Unseen for 60 years, the Daily Mail begins today the serialization of a lost short story by Agatha Christie featuring her Belgian detective Hercule Poirot. Titled "The Capture of Cerberus" (which was also the title the author used for another, completely different story published in 1947), it features a Russian femme fatale, a crazed tyrant, and an assassination that shakes the world.
Her story notes had lain undiscovered for decades, gathering dust in a battered cardboard box. There were shopping lists and jottings, hastily scribbled notes, and page after page of virtually indecipherable handwriting in blue-lined notebooks. But author and dedicated Christie enthusiast John Curran painstakingly threaded together the notes and handwritten ingredients of an unseen story that eventually became a typed script.
The story is unusual in that Christie ventures into (then) contemporary politics, surely one of the reasons the story wasn't accepted for publication at the time, and it includes a hint of sex: Poirot is stirred into excitement by feminine beauty.
Curran writes of his discovery in a new book, Agatha Christie's Secret Notebooks: Fifty Years of Mysteries in the Making, to be published in the UK next month. In the meantime, visit the Daily Mail to read a serialized version of "The Capture of Cerberus" now.
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