Agatha Christie Teaches the Art of Serialization
Or at least her editor does
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Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None, serialized in the Saturday Evening Post, May 1939.
With a book, we commit. We hold the complete work in our hands (or on our screens). Metaphorically, we say, Yes, I’m going to read you.
Serializations are different; we promise them nothing. The author (or her editor) has to leave readers wanting to find out what happens next.
As you know, I like to learn from the masters. We’re going to look at Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None,1 which was serialized in the Saturday Evening Post in 1939. It’s a brilliant serialization and teaches us to
write installments, not chapters;
think like an editor;
understand the magic of cliffhangers.
And, believe it or not, Dame Agatha wasn’t the genius behind it.
In case you haven’t read And Then There Were None, here’s a summary. Ten people are invited to an island mansion under false pretenses. It turns out all ten guests are responsible for the deaths of other people and got away with it. The guests are murdered one by one in ways that parallel the nursery rhyme “Ten Little Indians.” (See the footnote below for more on the title of the nursery rhyme and the novel.)
1. Write Installments, Not Chapters
Approaching your work in terms of chapters isn’t helpful when it comes to serialization. A chapter is defined as a book section, usually marked with a number or title.
If you google novel chapter specifically, you might come up with more specifics, e.g., a chapter has scenes and organizes plot points. But you’ll also get some really bad advice. One famous online celebrity-teaching empire (yes, Masterclass) tells us that a chapter can introduce a character (snooze) or pause to let the protagonist consider the situation (double snooze) or be used for flashbacks (yikes!). (Flashbacks kill narrative tension and take a masterful hand to do well.) These approaches may work in some books written by ultra-brilliant writers but not in serial novels or memoirs penned by mere mortals.
Installment is more illustrative of what we’re doing: “one of several parts published in sequence over a period of time.” (Installment is the term serializers have always used. Kindle’s Vella and others like episodes. To me, that suggests a podcast or TV show. I’m a purist but use whatever works for you—just not chapters.) We’re writing something that readers have to want to keep reading.
Throughout history, authors have taken two approaches to serialization. They either 1) wrote them in real-time (week by week, month by month) or 2) let magazine editors serialize their finished manuscript/book.
Charles Dickens mapped out his novels, writing and publishing each installment as he went along. (The Event Ladder I teach you in the Prep-Your-Novel and Prep-Your-Memoir courses is modeled after his mapping method.) When reader interest flagged, he’d change the plot.
Other authors—and there are many—let their novels be serialized after writing them in book form. You’d think this would mean just publishing the chapters. Not so, my friends, not so.
2. Think Like an Editor at the Saturday Evening Post in 1939
The Post was instrumental in supporting serial fiction. It serialized novels by Jack London, Nero Wolfe, P.G. Woodhouse, and William Faulkner. (Yes, mostly white, heterosexual men, but that’s to be expected given the time period.) The editors understood that a successful serialization isn’t the same as a successful book. Magazine readers have different needs. For each novel, the fiction editor was tasked with creating installments that kept readers engaged from one magazine issue to the next.
Christie wrote And Then There Were None with sixteen chapters and an epilogue. When it was serialized in the U.S., the editors created installments better suited to magazine readers. Seven installments appeared in The Post.
The Post’s installments aren’t just different, they’re more compelling. Why? The editor of the Saturday Evening Post knew how to write cliffhangers.
3. Understand the Magic of Cliffhangers
This will sound like sacrilege to Christie devotees, but the Post’s editor was better at writing cliffhangers than she was. A cliffhanger is a tense unfinished ending, the result of which can’t (or shouldn’t be able to) be predicted. It’s endemic to serialization.
According to literary lore, the term is named for Thomas Hardy’s serial novel, A Pair of Blue Eyes, which appeared in Tinsley’s Magazine between 1872 and 1873. One installment ends with the character Henry Knight hanging—yes—from a cliff. (By his hands. Think: rock climbing.)
A cliffhanger may take the form of
a physical threat,
a decision unmade, or
a question unanswered.
Cliffhangers weren’t really Christie’s forte. Many of her chapter endings are lackluster—to say the least. If we were to judge her on her chapter endings alone, she might no longer hold the title of the Queen of Mystery.
Chapter 1 ends with a bleary-eyed old man randomly telling one of the characters that a day of reckoning is coming. Foreshadowing but not a cliffhanger. Kind of meh.
The ending of chapter 2 hardly puts the reader on the edge of their seat either. One of the characters … dresses and goes down to dinner. That’s it. Do I want to keep reading? Only because the book is in my hands, but if it were in the Post, I wouldn’t care.
The Post’s editor must have known this. The first installment includes chapters 1 and 2, plus the first section of chapter 3. In doing so, he smartly ends the first installment on the big reveal where the guests are called out (via a recording on a gramophone) for the crimes they’ve committed. It ends on the final accusatory, “Prisoners at the bar, have you anything to say in your defence?”
Do I want to keep reading? Hell, yeah. Will I wait a week to do so? Hell, yeah.
The third installment ends on a cliffhanger as well. To do so, the editor combines several chapters and (gasp) cuts one of Christie’s sentences to create a better ending. Three characters hear something suspicious in one of the rooms and prepare to burst in on whoever is in there. The installment ends, “Then all three stopped dead.” We’re left wondering what’s inside the room.
In book form, the cliffhanger is undercut. The three characters still stop but instead of leaving the reader to wonder what they find, as the Post’s editor did, Christie blows it, opening the door and ending on, “Rogers was in the room, his hands full of garments.” Meh.
Cliffhangers and Memoirs
It’s not that memoirists shouldn’t use cliffhangers; just know that cliffhangers can feel heavy-handed in nonfiction. Do end chapters with a physical threat, a decision unmade, or a question unanswered but with a little less of the du-nuh ending.
Dan Brown Teaches Cliffhangers
Dan Brown (whose books I haven’t read) gives this advice for creating cliffhangers (I’ve done this and like it). Once you’ve finished an installment, move the last few paragraphs to the next installment. It won’t always create a cliffhanger, but it may give your ending that cliffhanger-feel.
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Dame Agatha is a controversial figure. She’s denounced by some as a colonialist, a political conservative, an antisemite, a xenophobe, and a racist. She was a colonialist and politically conservative but, to my knowledge, wasn’t a xenophobe, antisemite, or racist. Her characters were, but that’s not the same thing.
Then there’s the issue of the original title of And Then There Were None. A nursery rhyme serves as the controlling device in the book. That nursery rhyme has the worst racial epithet in its title. And Then There Were None was originally titled with that epithet. Then it was changed to Ten Little Indians. Not much better. Then Ten Little Soldiers. As one Agatha Christie scholar put it, Dame Agatha was guilty of the unconscious racism, anti-semitism, xenophobia, and colonialism of her time. I’m not excusing it, but for me (and it’s an individual choice), it isn’t a reason to cancel the Queen of Mystery.
Yay! I'm so glad. Posting the first installment can be weirdly unnerving. Just know I'm here cheering you on. Onward!
Nooow we are getting to it.....
Thank you!
This is gold
Will try my first installment by the time the next Gem comes out
#goodstuff