Agatha Christie and Poirot – szókincs, olvasmány, olvasott szövegértéses feladatok

HOW CHRISTIE WROTE

Agatha Christie always said that she had no ambition to be a writer although she made her debut in print at the age of eleven with a poem printed in a local London newspaper. 1. ________  .

By her late teens she had had several poems published in The Poetry Review and had written a number of short stories. 2. ________  .

Agatha Christie wrote about the world she knew and saw, drawing on the military gentlemen, lords and ladies, spinsters, widows and doctors of her family’s circle of friends and acquaintances. She was a natural observer and her descriptions of village politics, local rivalries and family jealousies are often painfully accurate. 3. ________ 

The most everyday events and casual observations could trigger the idea for a new plot. Her second book The Secret Adversary stemmed from a conversation overheard in a tea shop: “Two people were talking at a table nearby, discussing somebody called Jane Fish… That, I thought, would make a good beginning to a story — a name overheard at a tea shop — an unusual name, so that whoever heard it remembered it. A name like Jane Fish, or perhaps Jane Finn would be even better.”

And how were these ideas turned into novels? She made endless notes in dozens of notebooks, jotting down erratic ideas and potential plots and characters as they came to her “I usually have about half a dozen (notebooks) on hand and I used to make notes in them of ideas that struck me, or about some poison or drug, or a clever little bit of swindling that I had read about in the paper”.

She spent the majority of time with each book working out all the plot details and clues in her head or her notebooks before she actually started writing. Her son-in-law Anthony Hicks once said: 4. ________  

As grandson Mathew Prichard explains, “she then used to dictate her stories into a machine called a Dictaphone and then a secretary typed this up into a typescript, which my grandmother would correct by hand. I think that, before the war, before Dictaphones were invented, she probably used to write the stories out in longhand and then somebody used to type them. 5. ________  . I think a book used to take her, in the 1950s, just a couple of months to write and then a month to revise before it was sent off to the publishers. Once the whole process of writing the book had finished then sometimes she used to read the stories to us after dinner, one chapter or two chapters at a time. 6.________  . Of course, apart from my family, there were usually some other guests here and reactions were very different. Only my mother always knew who the murderer was, the rest of us were sometimes successful and sometimes not. My grandfather was usually asleep for most of the time that these stories were read but the rest of us were usually very attentive. It was a lovely family occasion and then a couple of months later we would see these stories in the bookshops.”

source: How Christie Wrote, agathachristie.com

A következő opciókat használva egészítsd ki a szöveget. A 6 kiegészítendő helyre 8 opciót találsz, így két extra opció van.

1. “You never saw her writing”, she never “shut herself away, like other writers do.”
2. She wasn’t very mechanical, she wrote in a very natural way and she wrote very quickly.
3. She was fond of reading on poisons and mysterious drugs.
4. Finding herself in bed with influenza, her mother suggested she write down the stories she was so fond of telling.
5. Although she got married twice, she praised the institution of marriage.
6. Mathew Prichard describes her as a “person who listened more than she talked, who saw more than she was seen.”
7. I think we were used as her guinea pigs at that stage; to find out what the reaction of the general public would be.
8. But it was her sister’s challenge to write a detective story that would later spark what would become her illustrious career.

keys/megoldások:
1. D.; 2. H.; 3. F.; 4. A.; 5. B.; 6. G.; extras: C. and E.

A következőkben 8 érdekes információt tudhatsz meg Hercule Poirot-ról.

1. Hercule Poirot first appeared in Agatha Christie’s first published novel The Mysterious Affair at Styles, which debuted in 1920. In her initial version Poirot explained all in a court room setting, but this was changed to a more familiar drawing-room discussion by the time it was published.
2. The first description of Poirot was by Hastings in The Mysterious Affair at Styles who said, “He was hardly more than five feet four inches but carried himself with great dignity. His head was exactly the shape of an egg, and he always perched it a little on one side… The neatness of his attire was almost incredible; I believe a speck of dust would have caused him more pain than a bullet wound.”
3. Poirot takes great pride in his appearance from his immaculately groomed moustache to his patent leather shoes. He uses a special preparation called ‘Revivit’ to conceal his grey hair.
4. Poirot’s obituary appeared on the front page of The New York Times in 1975, in advance of the publication of Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case – the first time a fictional character received this treatment.
5. In a rare filmed interview, Agatha Christie was asked which was the best Poirot novel. After some hesitation (“Oh dear that’s a tall order!”) she declared that it was probably Murder on the Orient Express.
6. In 2014, HarperCollins published the first authorised Poirot continuation novel, The Monogram Murders by Sophie Hannah, which reached the bestseller charts in 16 territories including the UK and US. This has since been followed by three further books, most recently The Killings at Kingfisher Hill in 2020.
7. Poirot stars in 33 novels and 59 short stories and 1 original full-length play by Agatha Christie, and 4 continuation novels by Sophie Hannah.
8. Poirot is very particular about what he drinks. He regularly consumes hot chocolate and tisanes, but he once called decaffeinated coffee an ‘abomination’.

source: https://www.agathachristie.com/characters/hercule-poirot/facts-about-hercule-poirot

A következő feladatban Poirot idézeteket olvashatsz, de az idézetek hiányosak.  A megadott 3 opcióból döntsétek el, melyik egészíti ki a legjobban az idézetet.

source: https://www.agathachristie.com/news/2018/eight-quotes-from-hercule-poirot