The remaining short stories by Agatha Christie

(These are the prefaces I've written for these two final collections of Agatha Christie stories.)

In this final post on Agatha Christie's short fiction, we'll go through those stories that do not feature any of her usual detectives. First we have volume no. 6 which contains those criminous stories that Christie wrote without any of her "usual" problem solvers. All except one were written during Christie's most prolific period between 1923 and 1930. The only exception is "Three Blind Mice" which was written as late as 1948.

It starts off with five short stories that can be categorised as pure fair play mysteries. First is "The Witness for the Prosecution", one of Christie's most famous tales, which was filmed with Charles Laughton and Marlene Dietrich in the main roles (and more recently was made into a TV special). A clever tale about a defense lawyer who believes his client to be innocent but cannot find a way to prove it.

When reading "S.O.S.", you almost feel as if you're reading a John Dickson Carr story. Emotions swell high and the atmosphere gets more and more pressing before we reach the exciting dénouement. A story that deserves more recognition.

"Sing a Song of Sixpence" is a cute little mystery where Sir Edward Palliser gets to act as the detective - somewhat reluctantly. He turns out to be as good at it as his more well-known colleagues.

Next is "Manx Gold", an unusual tale found fairly recently by Tony Medawar who wrote a preface and a postscript to the story explaining the circumstances surrounding its origin. Taken simply as a mystery story, it's not a complete success because it's more or less impossible to follow our young protagonists Juan and Fenella on their treasure hunt.

The last of the pure mystery stories is "Three Blind Mice", possibly most known as the story that the play "The Mousetrap" is based on. It is a novella and quite a meaty one at that. The misdirection hangs on one single thing, though, and any reader who sees through it will have no trouble in finding the villain of the piece. Still an enjoyable piece thanks to its lovely winter atmosphere.

The remaining seven tales of this collection are more reminiscent of the type that mystery critic Julian Symons called "crime novels" - though these are obviously short stories... Accordingly, they are criminous stories where the intention isn't necessarily for the reader to match his wits with the detective (and the author), they are rather simply stories about crime.

The first of these is "The Actress". This is a story about blackmailers and how to get rid of them. A fairly breezy story compared with some of the following ones.

"The Red Signal" gets deep into psychology and mental illness. A young man has fallen in love with a young lady, but it's hinted that she is mentally ill. But is everything really as it seems?

"Philomel Cottage" is another one of Christie's most anthologised stories. Here we have the young wife Alix who suddenly starts suspecting that she's married a man who might have more to hide than expected...

Next is "Wireless" where Christie's weakness for the supernatural (see the next volume of this series) comes to the fore. An elderly lady seems to be contacted by her late husband through the new radio she's had installed.

In "Swan Song" an opera singer gets the opportunity to sing the demanding lead part in Tosca. In this opera the leading role dies - and the parallels to the opera start to pile up...

"The Edge" concerns a young lady who despises the woman her previous beau has married. And when she finds out something sordid about this woman's past she needs to decide how to proceed with this knowledge.

Volume 6 ends with "Accident", where a retired policeman finds it hard to let go when he imagines himself to be face to face with a criminal from the past. The question Christie seems to ask is whether it's always the right thing to try to intercede in such cases.

The seventh and final collection of Agatha Christie short stories gives us those tales that cannot be classified as criminous. The first six stories are purely romances. They were written in the middle of the 1920s, and if Christie had by then already started using her pseudonym Mary Westmacott these short stories would probably have been published under that name.

The first of these is "While the Light Lasts", a dramatic story which is set in the Sahara desert and deals with the eternal triangle.

Next is "Within a Wall", about an artist and his attempts to break out of the rigid patterns his craft has got stuck in. Interestingly a minor character from the Miss Marple canon appears here.

"Magnolia Blossom" concerns yet another triangle relationship where a married woman is torn between her sense of duty and her heart.

"The Lonely God" is a small museum piece who sees to visitors - one woman and one man, of course. The statue becomes a catalyst to the events of the tale.

At a first glance, "A Fruitful Sunday" seems more similar to what you might expect from Christie, but in the end romance wins out.

The last of the pure romances is "Next to a Dog", which sympathetically describes the opportunities a young woman without means or skills had (or rather didn't have) in the 20s.

The following eight stories are romantic adventures. The adventure genre was something Christie liked to return to. Her versions of exciting thrillers are not very similar to what we're accustomed to in the book stores nowadays. They are breezy adventures with suspect women, tough villians and mysterious employers.

The first story of these is "The Girl in the Train", wherein a young man bumps into a young lady during a train journey. From there they get into a number of entanglements before everything turns out all right in the end.

Then we come to "The Mystery of the Blue Jar" where the young man - it's often nice young men... - hears a mysterious scream while he is playing golf. The surprising dénouement raises this tale above the average.

Next we get to follow "Mr. Eastwood’s Adventure". Mr. Eastwood is a struggling author who suddenly receives a mysterious message over the phone. Christie toys with the reader's expectations.
 
In "Jane in Search of a Job" we meet another young lady without means or skills. However, Jane is a bit more enterprising than Joyce, who we met in "Next to a Dog", and responds to an ad where she is offered a job as a double for a foreign princess. An enjoyable kidnap adventure follows.

"The Manhood of Edward Robinson" gives us another young man whose won some money through a newspaper competition. Now he has to decide whether to follow his fiancée's reasonable advice or spend it all on a swanky car. The car it is and during his first trip our hero falls into an exciting adventure with jewels and beautiful young ladies.

The title of "The Listerdale Mystery" might hint that we'll get something we generally expect from Christie, but the mystery in question is not criminous (and not particularly hard to solve either). A family gets to rent a house for a suspiciously low sum of money. A butler who is too good to be true is included in this bargain. Cozy but never particularly serious.

"The Rajah's Emerald" is stolen at a seaside resort, and our young hero comes under suspicion because someone under mysterious circumstances put the jewel in his pocket. The best thing about this story is the young man's name.

In the last of these romantic adventures, "The Golden Ball", the young couple are suddenly imprisoned in a house after a car trip, and the young man has to show his chops when they are trying to escape.

The final collection ends with ten stories where Christie dabbles in the supernatural and horror. As so many other mystery writers, she had a great interest in unexplained events, and in these final tales she lets her imagination run wild. In contrast to the other stories of this collection, which were all written in the mid or late 20s, these stories span from that time period all the way to the mid 30s. The last of these stories was actually written as late as 1958.

The first of these supernatural tales is "The Fourth Man". Four men are sitting in a train compartment, and one of them tells a story about his childhood when he knew two young girls, one beautiful and spoiled, another ugly and stupid. As the story goes on the audience (as well as the reader) realises that something is not quite right.

Then we come to "The House of Dreams" which deals with a young man who suddenly begins dreaming about a house. In his dreams he gets closer and closer to the house, but he always wakes up before he can open the door...

"The Last Séance" is even closer to the horror genre. A medium is about to perform one final séance before giving it all up to marry her young man. She has certain misgivings before the séance, but he convinces her to go through with it.

In Cornwall, there are rumours about a dog, "The Hound of Death", who roams around at night. Our young protagonist is visiting his sister and starts to investigate why a Belgian refugee, a young nun, has delusions.

In "The Lamp", a family of father, daughter and her son move into a new house, but before long they start hearing things in the house, and the grandson begins speaking about a playmate none of the adults can see...

"The Gypsy" appears in a young man's dreams, warning him about different types of events. When the young man dies from a surgery he was warned from, his friend decides to investigate things more closely.

Next is "The Strange Case of Sir Arthur Carmichael", where a doctor starts to investigate why a young man appears to be insane lately. Since the story is narrated in the first person, it has a more personal touch compared with many of the other stories here, which is to its advantage.

An elderly, well-to-do man who is content with his life suddenly begins hearing something he calls "The Call of Wings", which makes him more and more nervous. As time passes, he tries to get rid of his oppressive wealth to ease his burden, but nothing seems to help...

In the story "In a Glass Darkly", a young man sees a murder scene in a mirror he should not have been able to see. He uses it to warn the female murder victim, and soon a love affair grows between them. A clever twist towards the end makes this tale one of the best here.

Finally, there's "The Dressmaker’s Doll" which can also be called a horror story. An old, worn doll turns up in a dressmaker's shop, and soon the doll's aura and appearance has resulted in it taking over an entire room for itself.

Conclusion

The first five mysteries of collection six are all very good, with the exception of "Manx Gold" which doesn't really work as a story (though that is fully understandable since it was never written to be that).

As for the more noirish tales towards the end of the same volume, some of them are quite effective. I'm not particularly fond of that type of story, but Christie does quite well with this genre. I have to admit that I still don't fully understand what happens towards the end of "Philomel Cottage"...

As for the romances that constitute the beginning of volume 7, they are definitely not my cup of tea. I prefer the later romantic adventures, because at least there's some action (and some surprises) there.

The horror and supernatural stories towards the end of this final collection are also quite effective. The surprises are few, but Christie has a deft hand for setting moods. It's not really the kind of stuff I generally read, but I've seen much worse stuff in this genre.

There are no impossible mysteries here, so nothing new to add to my project.

The Harley Quin stories by Agatha Christie

(This is a translation of the preface I wrote to this collection of stories.)

In this part 5 of Agatha Christie's collected short fiction, Mr. Harley Quin is our detective. Well, that is a modified truth, because the farther we get in this collection, the larger is the role of his companion and assistant Mr. Satterthwaite and the more Quin himself is marginalised.

Harley Quin has to be seen as a somewhat different acquaintance. In contrast to the other detectives Christie used, Quin is more of a catalyst who gets Mr. Satterthwaite to draw conclusions about different cases they come into contact with. Quin becomes more of a supernatural being who appears at the exact right moment to trigger something.

The stories about Mr. Quin began publication in the middle of the 1920s, and in 1926 a cohesive series of six Quin stories was begun with the sub-heading "The Magic of Mr. Quin". This series of stories was commissioned by British magazine, The Story-Teller, but several of them were actually first published in the American magazine Flynn's Weekly.

However, Christie continued producing stories about Mr. Quin throughout the 20s, but the final story is probably from around the time of WWII, even though it wasn't published until more than 20 years later. Twelve of the Mr. Quin stories were collected in "The Mysterious Mr. Quin", while the other two were published in later collections.

This volume starts off with "The Coming of Mr. Quin" where we meet Mr. Satterthwaite, who throughout the collection is the focal point for the reader and whose thoughts we get to follow. During an enjoyable dinner, Mr. Quin appears unexpectedly and during the story that follows a mystery is solved and a suicide is averted. A good introduction to this collection.

The next story is "The Shadow on the Glass", where a family ghost seems to have the solution for the death that happens when Mr. Satterthwaite is a weekend guest. Mr. Quin appears towards the end and with a couple of well-chosen words he makes everyone realise what actually happened. Yet another clever story.

After some prompting from Mr. Quin, Mr. Satterthwaite travels all the way to Canada in "The Sign in the Sky" to try to smash an ironclad alibi, so this is one of all too few impossible Christie crimes. This is yet another good story where Christie, like the master she was, drops a clue that the reader will have to be very alert to notice.

"At the Bells and Motley" comes next. Here Mr. Satterthwaite has been stranded on an inn when his car breaks down, but of course he bumps into Mr. Quin there. Mr Satterthwaite recalls an old story about a disappearance in the area, and together they manage to logically conclude what actually happened. Another impossible story, and quite a fine one at that.

Then follows the suite of six stories that starts with "The Love Detectives". What these stories have in common is that they concern amorous relationships that in some way have gone wrong or are threatened - but it is still the byplay between Mr. Satterthwaite and Mr. Quin that takes centre stage. In this first story they need to sort out the mess that arises when a man is found shot and everyone confesses to the murder - and in this way save a pair of lovers.

"The Soul of the Croupier" takes place in southern France and Monte Carlo where one of those silly young Americans gets tangled up with a mercenary woman. It takes a croupier's love story to get him untangled again.

Then we reach "The World's End" on Corsica, where Mr. Satterthwaite and Mr. Quin and some acquaintances run into another group of people. In the end, this coincidental meeting has the result that yet another suicide is averted.

The fourth tale of this suite is "The Voice in the Dark". We get another story from the past which manages to sort out what has happened and what is about to happen. An atmospheric and sad story.

With "The Face of Helen" we return to current times - or at least the time when the stories were written. After a visit to the opera, Mr. Satterthwaite runs into Mr. Quin as well as the young lady who's given the story its name. A sinister murder is averted in the eleventh hour thanks to these two encounters.

Christie chose to finish the six story suite with "Harlequin’s Lane", which is understandable given the very effective ending we get here. Nowhere is Mr. Quin as supernatural as in this tale where human relationships have an unusually large role to play.

"The Dead Harlequin" is luckily not our friend Mr. Quin. The title refers to a painting with the same name. This story is rather similar to the first Quin story - we're at another dinner  party and hear another story about the past. Mr. Quin is hardly present, and Mr. Satterthwaite gets all the balls rolling by himself. Another strong story.

"The Man from the Sea" is not a criminous story, it only concerns human relationships. That doesn't make it a bad story - it is in fact fairly strong. Mr. Quin makes just a very short appearance towards the end of the tale and disappears quickly and supernaturally again.

In "The Bird with the Broken Wing", Mr. Satterthwaite has been invited to yet another weekend party. He participates in a séance which somehow lets Mr. Quin get in touch with him. He takes these instructions as an omen and can in this way solve the murder that occurs later.

We finish with "The Harlequin Tea Set", which is a couple of decades younger than the other stories here. Mr. Satterthwaite is now a yet older man, and bumps into Mr. Quin at a café along the road. This encounter gives him the opportunity to prevent another murder that is about to occur. A fitting end to a remarkable series of stories.

Conclusion

I like the Harley Quin series of stories. They aren't quite as focused on the mystery as most Christie stories, but all in all I think Christie succeeds in this blend of romance, mystery and the supernatural. Harley Quin is an interesting character, even though (or perhaps because) we never really get to know him. (Mr. Satterthwaite, of course, later appeared in an Hercule Poirot novel - "Three Act Tragedy" - and has a cameo in the Poirot novella "Dead Man's Mirror".)

Even better, there are in fact two impossible mysteries among this bunch. Both are quite good, though I think "The Sign in the Sky" has the slight upper hand. Both are good enough to be used in my impossible mystery project.

The Parker Pyne stories by Agatha Christie

(This is a translation of the preface I wrote for this collection of stories.)

Part four of Agatha Christie's collected short stories is comprised by those tales who feature James Parker Pyne as their detective. Like so many of Christie's short stories, this collection mainly consists of a bunch of stories that were commissioned by a magazine. In this case it was the American Cosmopolitan who in the early 30s wanted something by the world's most famous mystery author.

It's fair to say that these tales were written in two batches. The first one, comprising six stories, were published during 1932 (with an exception for the very first story which reportedly was first published in the collection "Parker Pyne investigates"). They have an overarching structure with clients who come to Mr. Parker Pyne's offices because they are dissatisfied with something. Whereupon Pyne in different ways tries to correct their problem.

The second batch, mainly published in 1933, are more reminiscent of the stories that Christie produced with Hercule Poirot as problem solver. In these cases, Mr. Parker Pyne is out travelling through southern Europe and the Middle East, running across problems that he has to solve.

This collection adds the two Parker Pyne stories that weren't originally featured in "Parker Pyne Investigates". One of them is almost certainly a leftover from the second batch of stories above, while the other is a rewrite of a Poirot story.

In "The Case of the Middle-aged Wife" (which is the one story that wasn't published in a magazine and had to wait until the collection) Mr. Parker Pyne and his agency are introduced. His advert "Are you happy? If not, consult Mr Parker Pyne, 17 Richmond Street" attracts a diverse bunch of people and then Mr. Pyne, with assistance from Miss Lemon and miss Ariadne Oliver (both of whom will later appear in Hercule Poirot novels), designs a more or less far-fetched scenario which is supposed to correct their problems. In this introductory story the reader will easily see through Mr. Pyne's plan. It's all quite easy-going, but never particularly exciting.

In "The Case of the Discontented Soldier", the titular military man gets an adventure where he has to save a fair young lady from a from a pickle. Meanwhile, "The Case of the Distressed Lady" is quite reminiscent of the Poirot short story "The Veiled Lady".

In "The Case of the Discontented Husband" Mr. Pyne has to concede defeat when his little plan goes awry. "The Case of the City Clerk" gives us yet another one of those adventure stories that Christie was so fond of. The last of these six similar stories is "The Case of the Rich Woman", wherein Mr. Pyne gets to live out his god complex to the full.

After these six introductory stories, Mr. Pyne seems to take a holiday, going out on a trip through Europe and the Middle East. In "Express to Stamboul" he gets to assist a young lady whose jewels are stolen aboard the train. The modern man might question some of the advice Mr. Pyne gives towards the end of the story.

In the following tale, Mr. Pyne has reached "The Gate of Baghdad" together with a group of tourists. During their bus trip a man is murdered, and Mr. Pyne finds a surprising killer.

Then we go to Persia and "The House of Shiraz", wherein the mystery is thinner than a spider's web. Everything hinges on a single detail, and the astute Christie reader should recognise the misdirection she uses.

"The Pearl of Price" is a bit better. The titular pearl vanishes when Mr. Pyne and his fellow tourists are in Petra, Jordan, and we get a fair surprise towards the end.

The following story is "Death on the Nile", which has nothing in common with the novel of the same name - except that they are set in Egypt. Though only nominally in this case, since all the action takes place on a tourist ship. That is not to the detriment of this tale's quality - it is one of the better ones of this collection. A woman is murdered on board and Mr. Pyne gets to draw some quick conclusions about the culprit.

The final story from "Parker Pyne Investigates" sees Mr. Pyne in Greece, visiting "The Oracle at Delphi". An older woman is travelling with her son, and the latter is kidnapped. Luckily, Mr. Pyne is staying at the same hotel and is able to help her out. A pretty nifty story.

Next is "Problem at Pollensa Bay", which admittedly was published a couple of years after the previous stories, but probably was written at the same time, since Mr. Pyne is still out on his holiday trip - this time on Majorca. The story is on the slighter side - Mr. Pyne gets to help a lady who isn't too impressed with the female company her son is choosing - and also somewhat similar to "The Oracle at Delphi" which might be an explanation why it had to wait a bit for its first publication.

The final story is "The Regatta Mystery". It was originally written with Hercule Poirot as its protagonist, and is more or less a copy of that version. A rather clever story where a jewel goes missing and Mr. Pyne gets to act the armchair detective when he helps the chief suspect in finding the real criminal.

Conclusion

I'm not overly fond of the opening six stories. The whole thing where Mr. Pyne meddles like crazy to affect the lives of other people leaves me cold - so I quite enjoyed it when he got his comeuppance in one of them! It doesn't help that they are quite formulaic as well - though it has to be said that the plots Mr. Pyne dreams up are fairly dissimilar.

The other stories are generally much better (and less original, admittedly). I like that they are set in various places across the world. Most are written with Christie's usual light touch, and some are quite clever indeed ("The Gate of Baghdad",  "The Pearl of Price", "Death on the Nile").

There's just one impossible mystery here, "The Regatta Mystery", and that story was already included through its Poirot version, so unfortunately there were no new additions to my project here either.

Partners in Crime (The Tommy & Tuppence stories by Agatha Christie)

(This is a translation of the preface I wrote for this collection.)

Tommy and Tuppence Beresford are the detectives in this third volume of Agatha Christie's collected short fiction. All these tales about this cheerful couple were written in one go (though one of them was published a few years later) and have an overarching plot where Tommy & Tuppence are asked by the secret service to run a detective agency because it's supposed to be a meeting place for foreign agents.

The stories were written in the middle of the 20s and are typical of their time in many ways. But the most remarkable thing about them is that Christie lets each tale be a pastiche of other - at this time - famous mystery novelists.

Because of the overarching plot, the stories are not presented in chronological order but in the order they were published in the first edition of the English collection "Partners in Crime". The first two chapters, "A Fairy in the Flat" and "A Pot of Tea" are pure introductions to the collection and it's only in the second one where our detectives get to use their brain cells. It's a slight story, but a good enough introduction for the reader.

"The Affair of the Pink Pearl" is meatier. In this case, T&T emulate R. Austin Freeman's scientific detective Dr. Thorndyke (though we get a quick reference to Sherlock Holmes at the very beginning). Tommy gets to prove his stuff in this enjoyable story.

In "The Adventure of the Sinister Stranger", the titular character turns up in the detective agency with a somewhat transparent story, and Tommy jumps into a suspected trap with both eyes open. In this story, today's almost forgotten Okewood brothers by Valentine Williams are parodied. Compared to many of the other featured stories, this tale relates more tightly to the overarching plot - which is to its disadvantage since the problem solving parts are put on the backburner.

We leave the adventure genre for a return to something more mystery-like in "Finessing the King". It is Isabel Ostrander's McCarty and Riordan that T&T try to imitate here. After Tommy got to be the hero of the previous stories, Tuppence is the one to make the breakthrough here.

In the following story, "The Case of the Missing Lady", Tommy & Tuppence get to be Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. The solution to the mystery that Tuppence finds is probably as surprising to the reader as it is to our problem solvers.

"Blind Man's Buff" is yet again a return to adventure and a return to the overarching plot. Tommy tries to imitate Clinton H. Stagg's blind detective Thornley Colton when he is kidnapped and needs to somehow outwit his abductors.

Father Brown, G. K. Chesterton's gentle detective, should be familiar to the modern reader. He is the one who inspires the solution that Tommy cleverly reaches in "The Man in the Mist".

Christie continues to vacillate between mysteries and adventure stories. We get an example of the latter in "The Crackler" where Tommy is yet again abducted, this time by a gang of forgers. This time, it's Edgar Wallace's "The Busies" who are parodied.

We get one of the best stories of the collection in "The Sunningdale Mystery". Tommy imitates "The Old Man in the Corner", the Baroness Orczy's problem solver, and from a number of newspaper reports he reaches the solution needed to apprehend the villain of the piece.

In "The House of Lurking Death", it is A. E. W. Mason's Inspector Hanaud who is the inspiration for the solution. It is yet again Tuppence who proves herself in one of the more exciting stories in this collection.

Freeman Wills Crofts's Inspector French usually solves cases which involve ironclad alibis, and of course it is he who is emulated by our problem solvers in "The Unbreakable Alibi". The reader needs to be in a tolerant mood to accept the solution Christie presents.

"The Clergyman’s Daughter" uses Anthony Berkeley's detective Roger Sheringham as its model for our problem solvers. Tommy & Tuppence get to go on the usual treasure hunt where they need to interpret clues to reach their target. Again Tuppence gets to show her stuff.

Next is "The Ambassador’s Boots" where the detective Reggie Fortune (by H. C. Bailey) is the guiding star. It's a rather slight story where the plot feels rather random.

The final story "The Man Who Was No. 16" is a return to the adventure thriller genre, and the overarching plot is resolved. Funnily enough, Tommy and Tuppence get to parody Christie's own Hercule Poirot, and for a change Tuppence is the one to get kidnapped. When Tommy has used his little grey cells he finally manages to find her, and that also means that they manage to apprehend the gang of villains who were the original reason for T&T to run their detective agency.

Conclusion

This collection is more enjoyable if the reader has a working knowledge of at least half the detectives that Christie imitates and parodies, because to be honest most stories here are fairly slight. A couple are readable on their own ("Pink Pearl", "The Man in the Mist", "The Sunningdale Mystery" and "The House of Lurking Death"), but those who have a higher tolerance for 20s adventure thrillers will probably enjoy the rest more than I do.

Another drawback, for this project at least, is that there are no impossible crimes in this volume, so I don't get anything new to add. Still, these tales are easy reads and Christie's enthusiasm is apparent throughout the collection. And T&T are always a joy to read about. I'd recommend this book to a Christie fan, but not to someone who's never read her before.

The Miss Marple stories by Agatha Christie

(This is a translation of the preface I wrote for this second volume of Agatha Christie short stories.)

In volume 2 of Agatha Christie's collected short stories we get to know the author's second big problem solver, miss Jane Marple. In all, Christe wrote 20 short stories about the old lady, most of them from the end of the 1920s.

Between 1927 and 1931 she wrote 13 short stories for the British magazine Story-Teller. The first twelve of these have a common theme where the guests at a dinner party tell each other criminal anecdotes, and at the end Miss Marple gets to show off and explain the circumstances. These thirteen stories were later collected as "The Thirteen Problems". The other seven short stories are mainly from the 1930s and early 1940s.

In this volume, like the one for Poirot, the stories are not presented in publication order but rather in an internal chronological order (according to "The Life and Times of Miss Marple" by Anne Hart).

We start off with "The Tuesday Night Club" where the guests at the first dinner party are introduced. A nice little story, where the reader needs to be well versed in British nursery rhymes to be able to solve the problem.

Next is another example where Christie tackles an impossible mystery, "The Idol House of Astarte". A very good example of the genre and one of her cleverest Miss Marple stories.

"Ingots of Gold" is more of an adventure tale. I kind of enjoy it simply because it breaks up the mood. Otherwise, not the best of Christie's stories.

"The Blood-Stained Pavement", like its predecessor, takes place in Cornwall, and is somewhat reminiscent of the Poirot short story "Triangle at Rhodes". This comparison is not wholly to this story's advantage.

 "Motive vs. Opportunity" is probably the most easily solved mystery in this collection. The astute reader should have no problem to find the solution, which makes this story a bit of a disappointment.

"The Thumb-Mark of St. Peter" is one of many Christie tales which revolve around the spreading of gossip after a mysterious death. An all right story, nothing more.

With "The Blue Geranium" we're introduced to a new dinner company. Otherwise, the set-up is just the same as in the previous six stories. This is another rather clever least likely suspect story - and an impossible mystery, though that part is not played up at all.

The story "The Companion" has a murder motive that reminds you of many other Christie stories, and an avid Christie reader shouldn't find it too hard to see through the author's tricks.

In "The Four Suspects" we suddenly find ourselves in a spy tale, though disguised as a fair play mystery. Miss Marple produces a surprising culptrit, but surely there aren't very many clues here?

"A Christmas Tragedy" takes place in a hotel where Miss Marple has to crush a seemingly ironclad alibi, so it's another impossible mystery. The solution has some similarities with a certain Poirot novel, though they differ in a very important respect. This is one of the better stories here.

"The Herb of Death" has some similarities with the novel "Postern of Fate", and it has to be said that the solution is produced from the flimsiest of clues.

The final of the twelve dinner party stories is "The Affair at the Bungalow", which to be honest is quite confusing - not unlike the person who's telling the anecdote. Not the best story to finish this suite with.

After these tales, Christie rounded out her first Marple collection with "Death by Drowning". It reuses sir Henry Clithering from the earlier twelve stories, but takes place "in real time". Miss Marple asks sir Henry to investigate a death where she fears the wrong person is going to be accused of murder. Of course, she turns out to be right at the end. The main problem here is perhaps that Miss Marple herself is absent from a great part of the story.

The next story, "Miss Marple Tells a Story" has a chequered history, as it was originally written to be read on a radio broadcast, by Christie herself. This is also the only story which has Miss Marple herself as the narrator. It is somewhat reminiscent of "A Christmas Tragedy" since it's another impossible mystery taking place in a hotel. Another clever and enjoyable story, though I'd say it's impossible to find the killer here, because they're hardly in the story at all.

"The Case of the Caretaker" reminds me a bit of the first twelve stories insofar as Miss Marple has to solve a mystery which she is told about. There are some similarities here to the novel "Endless Night".

"Tape-Measure Murder" has a solution where the surprise hinges on Christie's clever storytelling technique. The reader needs to be on his toes to solve it before Miss Marple does.

We get one of the better stories of this collection in "The Case of the Perfect Maid". Miss Marple has to help out a servant girl who's been dismissed for something she didn't do. And of course it turns out that there is something more serious behind it all.

Next is one of those treasure hunt stories that Christie enjoyed, in the form of "Strange Jest". Miss Marple has to find out where an old uncle's fortune is hidden. Another tale where knowledge of old English idioms is to the reader's help.

"Sanctuary" is the longest of the Marple short stories, and also one of the most enjoyable ones. Here we return to the village of Chipping Cleghorn, the scene of the crime in "A Murder is Announced". A man dies on the church steps and Miss Marple needs to find out why he asked for sanctuary before shuffling off his mortal coil.

The final story here is "Greenshaw’s Folly". Another impossible crime solved by Miss Marple. The solution is actually quite clever, but I'm not sure how Miss Marple actually reached it. Surely she didn't just guess?

Conclusion

Miss Marple is the same in her short stories as she is in the novels. There is less of a focus on fair clueing. The first twelve stories are therefore perfectly suited to her, because there is no need there to produce any clues - we just accept that Miss Marple's explanations are the correct ones.

As for the impossible crimes here, all of them (with the exception of "The Idol House of Astarte") has some kind of problem, mainly in the fair play aspect. But most of them have a very clever explanation of the impossibility, which still makes them eminently readable.

Therefore, the only one I'll skip is "The Blue Geranium", because the impossibility isn't even addressed in the story. That leaves "Astarte", "A Christmas Tragedy", "Miss Marple Tells a Story" and "Greenshaw’s Folly" for inclusion in my project.

The Poirot stories by Agatha Christie

(This is a translation of the preface I've written to this collection of stories.)

This first volume of Agatha Christie's collected short fiction contains all Hercule Poirot's appearances in this smaller format. The bulk of the stories with Poirot as detective were written during the 1920s, and mainly in 1923, when Christie was commissioned to write a whole bunch of short stories for the magazine Sketch.

The first 24 stories here (as well as "Christmas Adventure" that appears a bit later) were first published in that magazine during 1923. They were thus written during Christie's early period as a writer, when her enthusiasm was at the highest level. (Remember that this should not be confused with Christie being at the top of her powers - that came later.) The stories have a fairly uniform and consistent quality, but obviously some stand out as more inspired than the rest. They are also of similar length.

In this volume the stories are ordered as they occurred in Poirot's career (according to "The Life and Times of Hercule Poirot" by Anne Hart). And therefore, the first story here is "The Chocolate Box", where Poirot tells his friend Arthur Hastings about his greatest failure. A somewhat slight story that sets a tone for what's to come.

Next is "The Kidnapped Prime Minister" which takes place just after the first novel, "The Mysterious Affair at Styles". Christie's attempt at misdirection works well as long as you do not think too hard about things, because that will give you the only possible solution.

In "The Lemesurier Inheritance", Christie succeeds better with her misdirection. Many readers will reach the same false solution as Hastings does.

After that we get to "The Affair at the Victory Ball", one of the highlights of the collection. With just a few pages at her disposal, Christie still manages to cram the story with action.

"The Disappearance of Mr. Davenheim" is an obvious homage to Sherlock Holmes where Christie uses exactly the same solution as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle did. So, not too hard to see through for the experienced mystery reader.

With "The Plymouth Express" Christie returns to her highest levels. This short story would later be expanded and rejigged into the novel "The Mystery of the Blue Train" (which not as successful as this shorter version, to be honest).

Then we come to "The Adventure of the Cheap Flat" where we get one of those special Christie things - the detective attach importance to a minor detail that no one else finds important.

"The Submarine Plans" is another one of those short stories that Christie later decided to reformat. In this case it was rewritten into the novella "The Incredible Theft". We'll return to that later in this collection.

Poirot accepts a case that appears quite banal at first sight in "The Adventure of the Clapham Cook", but when we reach the end it turns out that a much more dastardly crime has been solved through his contribution.

In "The Cornish Mystery", Poirot arrives too late to avert the tragedy he has already seen a glimmer of. A clever example of the least likely suspect.

It was likewise impossible to avert "The Tragedy at Marsdon Manor", since Poirot is not called in until after the fact. The 20s' emerging fascination for psychology gets an appearance here.

"The Mystery at Hunter's Lodge" is reminiscent of the previous tale in some respects, and the reader should be able to steer his suspicions in the right direction if he reads them immediately after each other.

The 20s weren't only the decade of emerging psychology, but also the decade of egyptology. In "The Adventure of the Egyptian Tomb", even Poirot has to solve one of the many Egyptian curses that seem to strike the poor archaeologists. The solution is somewhat far-fetched, and Poirot has to produce a couple of rabbits from his hat.

In "The Jewel Robbery at the Grand Metropolitan", Poirot needs to figure out who stole mrs Opalsen's pearls. Because surely it cannot be the only suspect, the maid!

Next is the shortest of all these tales, "The Market Basing Mystery". This is yet another story that was extended by Christie. The longer version, "Murder in the Mews", comes later in this volume.

The next story is "The King of Clubs", where Hastings's reasoning as usual is wrong. On the whole, a clever little tale.

In "The Adventure of the Italian Nobleman" Poirot gets tangled in typical 20s prejudices and gets to clean them up a bit. Now, a couple of decades later, this story appears a bit slight.

"The Double Clue" is our first encounter with Hercule Poirot's nemesis, the Countess Vera Rossakoff, who will appear later in both the novel "The Big Four" and the short story "The Capture of Cerberus". The salient clue is a fairly common one, and a reader who's well versed in mystery history shouldn't find it too hard to find the villain of the piece before Poirot does.

Just like Ellery Queen did, Agatha Christie wrote her own kidnap story where a young boy is kidnapped. "The Adventure of Johnnie Waverly" is surely a better tale than Queen's attempt, "Child Missing."

Hastings's sense of fair play gets a small rebuke in "The Case of the Missing Will". Surely we all agree with Poirot in his supposition towards the end? A clever treasure hunt where Poirot as usual gets to excel.

In "The Lost Mine", Poirot tells Hastings about an earlier case. There are heaps of sinister Chinamen and opium dens, and no one in their right mind would call this one of the highlights of this collection.

"The $1,000,000 Bond Robbery" is one of Christie's all too few forays into impossible crimes, but she acquits herself well here. Poirot has to solve a case where the bonds have disappeared even though they were watched every second.

Poirot has to investigate a case of blackmail in "The Case of the Veiled Lady". He gets to show his sleight of hand and cleverness on the way to a surprising dénouement.

In "The Adventure of the Western Star" Hastings tries to show off with expected results. The short story is possibly a bit too slight for its own good, but there's still something charming about how Christie uses small means to toy with the reader's expectations.

"Double Sin" is the first short story that isn't from the large batch commissioned by Sketch. The astute reader will pick up on this because Hastings no longer shares a flat with Poirot. Nevertheless, they go on a coach trip and end up investigating a theft which Poirot solves impressively. This is the last story featuring Hastings for quite a while.

The final tale from the Sketch batch is "Christmas Adventure", but no Hastings as far as we can see. Instead, Poirot is celebrating Christmas at a country manor. He runs into priceless jewels and mysterious deaths. An atmospheric story which would later be extended to almost double length, in the form of "The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding".

There's been a murder in "The Third Floor Flat" of the building where Poirot has his residence. He gets involved in the investigation, and of course easily finds the somewhat surprising culprit.

So far, all stories have been of more or less uniform length, but "The Under Dog" gives us a longer and meatier tale from Christie in the form of a novella. Poirot investigates the murder in the Tower Room and finds a surprising killer.

"Wasps’ Nest" has a somewhat different setup, where Poirot manages to prevent not only one but two deaths. A clever and atmospheric short story.

In "The Mystery of the Baghdad Chest", someone is found murdered inside the titular chest. Hastings makes a shortlived comeback here (this is his final appearance in a short story), and the entire story seems like a throwback to the format of the first short stories. The tale would later be extended and rewritten (and Hastings replaced by Poirot's secretary Miss Lemon) with a new title: "The Mystery of The Spanish Chest". This novella appears later in this volume.

"How Does Your Garden Grow?" is yet another one of those tales where Poirot receives a letter from someone asking for his help, but he arrives too late to prevent a death. A rather nifty little story where the reader might want to be well-versed in English nursery rhymes.

Another impossible mystery appears in "The Second Gong", where Poirot needs to solve a case where a country squire has been murdered in a locked room. A clever story with some fireworks in the solution. This is another short story that was later extensively rewritten into "Dead Man’s Mirror". (It appears later in this collection.)

"Problem at Sea" is the first of two short stories giving us a Poirot on holiday. This time he is out on a cruise. He has to solve an impossible crime where a woman is murdered in her locked cabin. The astute reader will probably not be fooled by Christie's little trick.

In the next tale, Poirot has apparently left the cruise. Instead, he has to deal with a "Triangle at Rhodes". As usual, not all is as it appears, and Poirot has to sort out the tangled webs of relationships after a woman has been poisoned. The question is if Christie doesn't go too far in her misdirections to hide the real relationships. You cannot blame a reader who isn't able to see through the tangle.

"Murder in the Mews" has already been mentioned as a longer version of "The Market Basing Tragedy". It is also one of Christie's experiments in impossible mysteries. This is clearly the better variant, and in this longer format Christie has the opportunity to get in more background to the plot than the rather shallow description we had in the earlier, shorter story.

We return to the shorter format with "Yellow Iris" (which was later rewritten into a novel not featuring Poirot - "Sparkling Cyanide"). Compared to this novel, the short story feels a bit truncated, and actually no crime is ever committed here - Poirot manages to prevent it. But the main plot idea is clever.

We continue to vary the length of stories with the novella "The Dream". Poirot gets to solve another impossible mystery - a crime where the victim had dreamed what was about to happen! The misdirection is not bad, but it has to be said that the murderer has some help from coincidence.

"Four-and-Twenty Blackbirds" is the last "regular" short story in this collection. Poirot is having dinner with an old friend, and one of the other dinner guests dies a short time later. Poirot suspects foul play and finds a surprising crime when he begins investigating.

"Poirot and the Regatta mystery" is a short story that would later be rewritten with another of Christie's series detectives, Parker Pyne, as the problem solver. These two variants are very similar - Christie more or less settled with only changing the names. The story itself is fairly clever - and features an impossible crime! - but one does have to wonder about those dinner guests' observation skills...

The following twelve short stories are all from the collection "The Labours of Hercules" and are a suite of tales with an overarching theme. Poirot decides to retire and to round off his career by figuratively following in his namesake Hercules's footsteps and solve twelve crimes in his spirit. The stories in question are written with a light hand and none of them can be described as a classic. But the main idea is solid, and obviously there's nothing wrong with Poirot's little grey cells.

This collection is rounded out by four tales that are "extended" versions of earlier short stories. "Dead Man’s Mirror" is the first and best of them. It's overall one of Christie's very best stories, with a clever impossible mystery and a correspondingly clever solution. It's also quite different from its precursor which means that they can both be read without one spoiling the other.

Next is "The Incredible Theft", a longer variant of "The Submarine Plans". As opposed to "Dead Man's Mirror", this story is very similar to its predecessor and thus doesn't give the reader much more despite the extra amount of pages.

"The Mystery of The Spanish Chest" has replaced the original Hastings with Miss Lemon. Otherwise, this story follows its predecessor "The Mystery of the Baghdad Chest" very closely.

And the final story of this collection is "The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding". This too is quite reminiscent of its earlier variant "Christmas Adventure" with the same main plot, but there is a larger focus on the Christmas atmosphere, which makes this version more charming.

Conclusion

Christie doesn't have too many impossible crimes in her oeuvre, but there's still a handful here: "The $1,000,000 Bond Robbery", "The Dream", "The Second Gong"/"Dead Man's Mirror", "Poirot and the Regatta Mystery", "Problem at Sea" and "The Tragedy at Market Basing"/"Murder in the Mews".

They are all fairly good (with "Dead Man's Mirror" being the outstanding story and "The Regatta Mystery" being the slightest). For the time being, I've decided to include them all in my impossible mystery project, and since Christie is at her best when she has more space I'll probably use the longer version in the two applicable cases.

The short stories of Christie, Carr and Queen

With the post on Edward D. Hoch's "All But Impossible", we've now gone through those short story collections that I've mined for impossible crime stories. The mystery savvy of you will find that some names are missing, and none more so - I guess - than Ellery Queen, John Dickson Carr and Agatha Christie.

(Some of you will probably want to know why Chesterton and Futrelle haven't been referenced either, but we'll get to them later. Promise. And if you've any suggestions of other good impossible crime collections, I won't mind getting tips in the comments...)

If you've followed this blog (and read some of my comments on other people's blogs), you will by now know that some time ago, I translated all short stories by Queen, Carr, Christie (and also Clayton Rawson, who has already been featured here with his two collections) into Swedish, because I wanted everything from these three giants to be available in my mother tongue.

While doing so, I also took the time to shuffle the stories around a bit, because for both Carr and Christie (and to some extent Ellery Queen), the available collections are a bit haphazard, featuring stories that are unconnected and very different, content-wise, chronologically and thematically. Christie admittedly has a couple that work rather well (e.g. "The Labours of Hercules" and "Partners in Crime"), but while some of the others are thematically linked at least by featured detective, they do not feature everything with the detective in question (cf. "Parker Pyne Investigates", "The Mysterious Mr. Quin", "Poirot Investigates"). Carr's collections are generally even worse.

So instead of going through each of these three authors' somewhat arbitrary collections I will use my own edited collections as the basis of the coming posts. We'll begin here with a quick runthrough of what these modified editions actually contain.

Agatha Christie

When I'd finished I ended up with seven different Christie collections. The first one collects all of Poirot's appearances in the shorter format (and is obviously a huge tome, since he is the most common protagonist in Christie's short fiction). In all, there are 55 Poirot short stories.

The second collection has all Miss Marple stories, as I'm sure you could guess. It's a somewhat slimmer collection, but still features 20 stories in all. Volume no. 3 is actually just "Partners in Crime", which features all 15 of the short stories with Tommy & Tuppence.

As for the fourth and fifth collections, they are simply expanded versions of "Parker Pyne investigates" and "The Mysterious Mr. Quin" respectively, where I've added the two stories featuring each detective that were not originally in those volumes, making them both 14 stories long.

The sixth collection features all mystery and adventure short stories published by Christie, having none of the aforementioned detectives as their main character. (One or two does use a minor character from elsewhere in Christie's canon, but I've chosen to ignore that.) There are only 12 stories here.

The seventh and final Christie volume collects stories that cannot be said to be mysteries. They are romances, horror or supernatural. This is the second largest volume of stories, featuring 24 stories in all.

John Dickson Carr/Carter Dickson

When it comes to the collections of Carr's short fiction, I've chosen to ignore whether they were published as Carr or Dickson, because frankly, there seems to be no general rule for what type of fiction was published as either. (Of course, Dr. Fell stories were published under the author's real name, while the Colonel March and Henry Merrivale stories appeared under the Dickson pseudonym.) Instead, I've created three volumes of short stories, somewhat based on the later anthologies "Fell and Foul Play" and "Merrivale, March & Murder".

The first collection uses all four Bencolin stories and adds all Carr's short stories that are historical mysteries and/or supernatural/horror stories, making a total of 14 stories. I've put all March and Merrivale stories in the second volume (11 stories in all). And finally, the third collection is where we find the five Dr. Fell stories, as well as those mystery stories that are set in present time where none of the main detectives are featured. That makes another 11 stories.

Ellery Queen

When it comes to Queen, I almost left the first three collections untouched. Almost? Yes, well. "Calendar of Crime" is entirely untouched, since that is a themed collection that works well as is.

As for "Adventures" and "New Adventures", they contain stories that were written close to each other chronologically, but since I'm kinda anal about things like that, I decided to shuffle the stories around so they are actually in chronological order inside the collection as well. That means that in "New Adventures" we get to see Queen change from the more rigid period one writers into the slicker period two Hollywood screenplay wannabe authors.

However, when it comes to the rest of Queen's short fiction, I made a jumble of everything in order to get them more thematic. I did, however, try to keep the title of the original collections.

So the fourth collection is QBI - Queen's Bureau of Investigation. The original collection made some kind of concession to having a theme by assigning the different stories to different police departments ("Department of Blackmail", "Department of Murder" etc.) For some reason, a couple of such stories were published in a later collection. I made the tough editor's choice (yeah right!) of moving those stories here...

The fifth volume is Q.E.D. - Queen's Experiments in Detection. What I created here is a sort of hodgepodge of this and that. The stories in QBI were all very short, just a few pages each. But in the same timeframe, the authors also wrote some longer stories; in some cases they could arguably be called novellas. There were also a couple of shorter ones that were not tied into the whole QBI theme. Those stories are the ones featured in this collection.

The sixth collection I called Ellery Queen's Journal of Crime, because it really is just a catch-all for everything that didn't really fit in the previous volumes. They are all from the later period of Queen's writing. There are some longer stories, and also a brace of shorter ones, the shorter ones featuring the so called Mystery Club. There are also another couple of stories with a challenge to the reader, and finally I included the only story which doesn't feature Ellery Queen the detective, "Terror Town". As you can see, it's sort of a mess...

Conclusion

This project was a fairly huge one, as I'm sure you can imagine. When it came to Christie, quite a lot of the stories had been translated into Swedish (there are several Swedish Christie collections), so there weren't that many that I had to translate myself. It was mainly T&T, Parker Pyne and some of the non-series stories that I had to translate.

(Of course, some ten years later someone finally had the bright idea of publishing "Partners in Crime" in Swedish, but by then I'd already translated them all, so I kept my own versions.)

However, when it came to Carr and Queen, none of them have any true collections of stories, though there are admittedly quite a few translated stories in anthologies as well as in Swedish magazines. I did have to translate at least one third of their short fiction.

It was quite a fun undertaking, though. I'm very glad to have finished the whole project and now I have everything available in an eBook format whenever I want.

In coming posts here on the blog, I will go through these collections more closely so we can see what stories I intend to use in my new impossible mystery project.