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. This month we’re reading four Poirot short stories, all published 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.
A woman leaves a fancy dress ball early and is later found to have died from a drugs overdose. Hercule Poirot investigates in this, the first story written about him.
I liked the use of the Commedia Dell’Arte characters at the costume ball to drive the mechanics of the story. It was nicely visual. I can see it would delight the television camera.
I was struck by how much the tone and the structure of the story reminded me of Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes short stories. I was a bit startled to discover that the final set of twelve Sherlock Holmes stories was published between 1921 and 1927, and so were contemporaneous with the publication of this story in The Sketch in 1923.
I thought that Hastings’ character came across very strongly. He seemed confident, amused and much more urbane than Dr Watson. It seems to me that the longer Hastings worked with Poirot, the more his self-assurance was diminished.
Although this was the first Poirot short story, the man appears fully formed as the character he will become, missing perhaps only his ethical concerns about how and by whom those he captures should be punished. Here is already the vain, manipulative, self-regarding man who, with a performer’s flourish, is always saying “Voyez-moi, Hercule Poirot, magicien extraordinaire!”
Hercule Poirot refuses to work on anything that isn’t a matter of national security. Instead he ends up on a case looking for a missing cook who left abruptly. As the mystery of the cook unravels, a clue for another crime catches Poirot’s attention…
I enjoyed watching Poirot deal with his indignation at being asked to take on a case as trivial as looking for a missing servant and then his rage at being dismissed from it after having, in his own mind, done the client a courtesy by accepting it.
Poirot smooth-talking people he does not respect so that he can get the information he needs, while constantly rebuking Hastings for his inability to think, spoke volumes about the man’s character.
The plot was clever if a little too elaborate to be plausible, but it was fun.
The fecundity of Agatha Christie’s imagination continues to impress me.
One by one the men who discovered and opened the tomb of King Men-He-Rah are beginning to die. Superstition spreads that they have been cursed by the dead king. Poirot is asked to investigate the supernatural deaths by a concerned mother. Hastings is left bewildered when Poirot asserts his belief in the supernatural…
I was amused to see that, already in 1923, when Christie published this, stories about cursed Egyptian tombs had become clichés of Gothic melodrama.
I think Christie had fun playing with these tropes, especially by having Poirot appear to take the superstitions seriously. This was a Scooby-Doo plot played for laughs.
Some of the insights into life in the 1920s were fun. It took days to travel from London to Cairo, and then the final leg of the journey was completed by camel. It was interesting, but not surprising, that no one felt the need to involve or even inform the Egyptian authorities about what Poirot was doing.
Dr Hawker receives a distressing call from a dying man who is then found bludgeoned to death in his flat. Poirot and Hastings accompany the doctor to the scene and find the remains of dinner for three, but where have the dining companions gone?
I was impressed by the cleverness of the plot for this one. I didn’t figure out what was really going on before the big reveal.
It was an idea that any other writer might have been proud to turn into a novel, but which Agatha Christie threw out as a short story in The Sketch.
Part of my enjoyment of the story came from seeing how the rich lived when they moved into a ‘modern’ serviced apartment: a concierge at reception, an operator for the lift, meals chosen from a menu and delivered from the kitchen via a dumb waiter. And even with all that, a gentleman still needed a live-in valet to take care of him.
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