I’m part of an online reading group that has just completed reading Agatha Christie’s novels in the order that they were published. Now, we’re turning our attention to the 50+ short stories that Agatha Christie publshed. The first four were published in magazines in 1923.
Below, I’ve given the publisher’s summary of the plot of each story and my comments on what each story was like to read.
In one of Agatha Christie’s earliest short stories, a plucky young actress must rely on her wits to thwart the machinations of a dark-hearted blackmailer…
This was a sliver of a story built around a novel way of frustrating a would-be blackmailer. It was a functional, plot-driven snippet, well-suited to fill a short story slot in a magazine, but its only enduring interest is as an example of Agatha Christie’s early work.
Poirot investigates the kidnapping of Johnnie Waverly, the three-year-old son of a wealthy couple in Surrey.
Could the butler be in on the plot?
And why were all the clocks in the house set ten minutes ahead at the time of the kidnapping?
This was fast, clever, and fun. The mystery was slight, but its execution was dramatic, although, through Poirot’s eyes, it perhaps verged upon farce. Having Hastings tell the tale made it more engaging than if I had had to live inside Poirot’s bright but smug mind. I liked the possibility that the butler did it – I wonder if that was already a cliché in 1923? – and I loved that he was called Tredwell. The indignant, red-faced, authoritarian Waverly was well drawn.
Movie star Mary Marvell consults with Hercule Poirot after receiving threatening letters that warn her to return her diamond, the famous ‘Western Star’, to its rightful owner.
But who does own the diamond, and is it even the genuine article?
What I liked most about this story was Agatha Christie’s sense of humour. The story is an elaborate joke played by Poirot on the ever-gullible Hastings (I do wonder how much Christie thought her readers resembled Hastings).
The plot depends on three racial stereotypes: the ‘Chinaman’ as the Yellow Peril, as propagated by Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu stories, the American Hollywood star as an unprincipled grifter, and the British aristocrat who has more inherited wealth than brains.
Hastings takes them all at face value and glories in being more perspicacious than Poirpt. Poirot sees through their games and bends them to his will while allowing Hastings to make a fool of himself.
The humour is neither subtle nor kind, but it did make me smile.
Captain Hastings finds out from Gerald Parker about an unusually cheap flat rented to Mr and Mrs Robinson near Knightbridge.
Mrs Robinson fears that the low price may be an indication that the house is haunted. Poirot is intrigued and sets out to investigate.
A remarkable chain of circumstances led from the apparently trivial incidents which first attracted Poirot’s attention to the sinister happenings which completed a most unusual case
This was a quirky story that started with the innocent Hastings relating to Poirot, an anecdote about one of the many auburn-haired women whom he finds charming and ended with Poirot in full counter-intelligence mode, outsmarting mercenary spies, the Mafia and the American Secret Service, all while making lame jokes about cats.
For me, the most surprising thing was that the ’The Japs’, as Christie describes them with her usual affinity for British Imperialist racial slurs, who had been part of the Alliance in World War I, were already seen in 1923, as the enemies of America. I have to wonder what the Americans had done by then to deserve that.
Mike Finn's Fiction 