Category: Short Stories

The Complete Parker Pyne: Private Eye by Agatha Christie

Published on by Margaret6 Comments

The Complete Parker Pyne Private Eye by Agatha Christie is a collection of all 14 Parker Pyne short stories. It’s also the book that was my Classics Club spin read to be read by 29th March. I did finish reading it before that date but I’ve only just got round to writing about it today! I’ve been very slow about writing reviews this year as ‘real life’ has had to take precedence over writing – but not over reading!

Agatha Christie wrote in her Foreword to this book that age enjoyed writing these stories. The idea for them came when she was having lunch at a Corner House – Lyons Corner Houses were British tea shops and restaurants operating from 1909 to 1977 – when she overheard a conversation on statistics at a table behind her. She turned her head and saw ‘a bald head, glasses and a beaming smile’. And so Mr Parker Pyne came into her mind and she used him for a new series of short stories that she was considering writing.

She wrote many short stories and although I prefer her full length books I also enjoy her short stories. Some of these in this collection are very short and the whole book can be read quickly. I think they were all published in various magazines before they were collected in this book. And I see that some of them are available as individual stories in Kindle e-books.

They all follow the same theme – Mr Parker Pyne places an advert in The Times every morning:

A former civil servant he had set himself up as a private investigator. He describes himself as ‘a heart specialist’. He’s rather fat and unconventional, kind-hearted yet businesslike. He doesn’t work alone but employs his secretary, a Miss Lemon (was she also Hercule Poirot’s secretary, Miss Felicity Lemon in later books?), novelist Mrs Ariadne Oliver, who appeared in The Case of The Discontented Soldier, a handsome lounge lizard, Claude Luttrell and disguise artist Madeleine de Sara.

Mrs Ariadne Oliver is a writer of detective fiction who also assists Poirot. I think Agatha Christie enjoyed writing about her, using her to express her own thoughts about writing, about Poirot and playwrights adapting her plays. In this story she is described as the author of forty-six successful works of fiction, all best sellers both in England and America and translated into French, German, Italian, Hungarian, Finnish, Japanese and Abyssinian.

Some of the stories are about people who responded to the adverts bur some are about people he met whilst travelling in places abroad, told in The Gate of Baghdad, The House at Shiraz (then in Persia, now Iran) The Pearl of Price (Petra in Jordan), Death on the Nile – not the same as the novel, The Oracle at Delphi (Greece) and Problem at Pollensa Bay (in Majorca). In these stories he is on holiday and reluctant to accept cases, but acts as an adviser or an investigator. I think these stories are the most interesting ones in this collection because she draws on her own experience of life in the Middle East, which she wrote under her married name Agatha Christie Mallowan, in Come Tell Me How I Live: an Archaeological Memoir, in answer to her friends’ questions about what life was like when she accompanied Max on his excavations in Syria and Iraq in the 1930s.

Overall, I think some of these stories are rather slight, but they are entertaining and I do like Parker Pyne, himself.

Two of Roald Dahl’s Completely Unexpected Tales

Published on by Margaret5 Comments

It’s March and Reading Wales ’26, hosted by Booker Talk and Kathryn Eastman from Nut Press is back for its ninth year to celebrate literature from this Celtic nation.

Roald Dahl’s parents were Norwegian but he was born in Llandaff, Glamorgan, Wales in 1916. He is well known for his children’s books. He was a poet, screenwriter and a wartime fighter ace, a military pilot who had officially shot down a minimum number of enemy aircraft, typically five or more, during aerial combat.

He also wrote numerous short stories for adults. There are several collections of these. I have just one – Completely Unexpected Tales by Roald Dahl, which is made up of two collections: Tales of the Unexpected and More Tales of the Unexpected. I first came across Roald Dahl back in 1979 when I used to enjoy watching these tales in the TV series, Tales of the Unexpected. There are 25 short stories in total in this book, some of them are very short, but I prefer the longer stories. As the title suggests these short stories all end with an unexpected twist, some are more predictable than others, but others did take me by surprise with a sting in the tail. I read some of them last year when I was taking part in Short Story September and wrote about a couple of the stories. You can read what I thought of them here.

I’ve revisited the book and read some more for Reading Wales ’26.

When I sat down to write about these two stories I wasn’t sure how much of the plots to describe without telling the whole story or giving away spoilers. So, I’ve been brief in describing the first story and a bit more detailed in describing the second one.

Lamb to the Slaughter was first published in Harper’s Magazine in September 1953. It is an ironic story with elements of black humour in which a horrific event is described in a comic manner.

It’s about a couple – Mary and Patrick Maloney. She’s a housewife, six months pregnant and he’s a senior policeman. The story begins as Mary is sitting peacefully sewing, looking forward to Patrick’s return home from work. It was a blissful time of day for her. But that all changed when he came in. She put down her sewing, and kissed him. He was tired and didn’t want to go out for a meal and shocked her when he said he had something to tell her. She heard him in silence watching him with a kind of dazed horror. Mary’s peace of mind was shattered and their evening ended in horror and murder.

In this story the title is a good clue. There is a fair bit of foreshadowing too, which gives you a good indication of what’s coming next and builds up suspense. And I did predict some of what would happen, but not all of it. The surprise ending gives the story an ironic and macabre feeling. I enjoyed the black humour.

Man from the South, first published in the American magazine, Collier’s in 1948, is also a macabre story, but less easy to predict and more shocking and gruesome. The suspense and tension rapidly rise in the 11 pages of this story. The title didn’t give me any hints and neither did the opening paragraphs. It begins in the early evening when the unnamed narrator is sitting by a swimming pool, enjoying the evening sun in Jamaica. Then an immaculately dressed older man from South America joins him followed by a young American sailor and an English girl.

During their conversation the sailor comments that his cigarette lighter never fails and the old man says that if the sailor can successfully light his lighter ten times in a row, he will win the man’s Cadillac, but if he fails, the man will chop off the sailor’s little finger. The American is taken aback, but eventually agrees and they all go up to his room, despite the English girl’s statement that it is a stupid ridiculous bet. What really made the tension worse is that the old man ties the boy’s hand to the table and stands there ready to chop the moment the lighter fails. This is all described in great detail and I read on with increasing dread. What would happen?

The narrator didn’t like the bet either – he didn’t know what to make of it all. Neither did I. But I read on as the pace of the story slowed as the boy counted out loud the number of times he successfully lit his lighter. How long would this go on? Would he lose his finger? I found it really shocking. He’d successfully lit it eleven times before the dramatic ending.

Both stories are written in a plain straightforward style, the characters are described in precise detail, and there are satisfying shock endings and twists in the tales, that didn’t leave me wanting to know more or thinking ‘so what’. Of the two I preferred Man from the South.

Completely Unexpected Tales by Roald Dahl

Published on by Margaret12 Comments

I’m taking part in Short Story September hosted by Lisa at ANZ LitLovers LitBlog She asks us to read a collection and then choose just one story to review, defining a short story as one that can be read in under an hour. It’s fine to mention the titles of other stories in the collection that you also enjoyed, of course. Aim for a review that’s less than 800 words, but this is not a hard-and-fast rule because some stories need less and others need more.

Roald Dahl is well known for his children’s books. He was a poet, screenwriter and a wartime fighter ace, a military pilot who had officially shot down a minimum number of enemy aircraft, typically five or more, during aerial combat.

He also wrote numerous short stories for adults. There are several collections of these. I have just one – Completely Unexpected Tales by Roald Dahl, which is made up of two collections: Tales of the Unexpected and More Tales of the Unexpected. I first came across Roald Dahl back in 1979 when I used to enjoy watching these tales in the TV series, Tales of the Unexpected. There are 25 short stories in total in this book, some of them are very short, but I prefer the longer stories. As the title suggests these short stories all end with an unexpected twist, some are more predictable than others, but others did take me by surprise with a sting in the tail.

Roald Dahl was born n Llandaff, Glamorgan. His parents were Norwegian. I bought this book at The Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre in the village of Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire where Dahl lived until his death in 1990. Previously I’ve read and enjoyed some of his children’s books.

On the back cover Completely Unexpected Tales is described as a superb compendium of vengeance, surprise and dark delight. I haven’t read all the stories yet but a couple stand out for me.The first is William and Mary, which was originally published in 1959 and included in his 1960 collection Kiss Kiss, a sinister story about the darker side of human nature.

After William Pearl died his wife, Mary received a letter which both surprised and shocked her. It wasn’t at all what she had expected. A domineering, unpleasant man he began in usual bossy way by telling her to:

continue to observe those precepts which have guided you so well daring our partnership together. Be diligent and dignified in all things. Be thrifty with your money. Be very careful that you do not . . . et cetera, et cetera.

She had hoped he might have written her something beautiful, that maybe he’d thank her for giving him thirty years of her life and for ironing a million shirts and cooking a million meals and making a million beds, something that she could read over and over again, once a day at least.

But, no this was a letter describing a scientific experiment that Doctor Landy, an Oxford University colleague wanted to do on his brain immediately after his death from cancer. She was shocked and appalled as he proceeded to tell her in great detail what it entailed.

He ended his letter with a postscript reminding her not to drink cocktails… waste money… smoke cigarettes… buy a television apparatus.

After she read it all, she reached for a cigarette, lit it, inhaling the smoke deeply and blowing it out in clouds all over the room. Through the smoke she could see her lovely television set, brand new, lustrous, huge, crouching defiantly but also a little self-consciously on top of what used to be William’s worktable. What would he say, she wondered, if he could see that now?

He disapproved of smoking and also of children and they’d never had any. But after thirty years of doing what he told her, she felt she had to follow his instructions and rang Landy to see whether the experiment had gone ahead. It had and Dahl describes it in disgusting and repulsive detail.

This is a story about control, revenge and the dark side of human relationships and as I read it I wonder how Mary would react. She’d already gone against his ban on smoking and watching television. But would she really break free of his control and could she indeed take revenge on him?

The other story features a couple with a very different marriage – Mrs Bixby and the Colonel’s Coat. Mrs Bixby has been having a secret affair for years with an extremely wealthy man known as the Colonel. When he gives her a beautiful mink coat she wonders what to tell her husband about where she got it. In the end she decides to pawn the coat and tell him she found the pawn ticket in a taxi and then she can retrieve the coat. But will this plan work? Is her dentist husband really as ignorant of her affair as she thinks. I was pleased with the ending of this story of betrayal and deception.

Library Books & Short Story September 2025

Published on by Margaret6 Comments

The mobile library van came yesterday and I borrowed three books of short stories to read for Short Story September 2025.

I’ve read books by each of the three following authors before:

Sleep No More: Six Murderous Tales by P D James – each one with the dark motive of revenge.

Normal Rules Don’t Apply by Kate Atkinson – Eleven interconnected stories, where everything is changing, where nothing is quite as it seems.

Six Stories and an Essay by Andrea Levy – This collection opens with an essay about how writing has helped Andrea Levy to explore and understand her heritage. She explains the context of each piece within the chronology of her career and finishes with a new story, written to mark the centenary of the outbreak of the Great War in 1914.

I also borrowed two other books:

The Gardener by Salley Vickers – Previously I’ve read five books by Vickers, and enjoyed them, especially Miss Garnet’s Angel and Mr Golightly’s Holiday. The last one I read was The Librarian, which I thought was rather underwhelming. I hope this one is better.

Nine Lives by Peter Swanson – I haven’t read any of Swanson’s books, but keep seeing them on book blogs and thought I’d see if I like this one.

Short Story September 2025

Published on by Margaret5 Comments

Lisa at ANZ LitLovers will be hosting a new reading event – Short Story September, running from September 1 to 30. On September 1st Lisa will set up a post where all contributions can be posted so that they form a valuable resource that is easy to find.

To participate, please keep it simple.  We all know that it’s hard to review short story collections, so all you are asked to do is to read a collection and then choose just one story from that collection to review.  To sidestep all the yada-yada about how many words a short story can be, just choose a story that can be read in under an hour.

Contributions should include the name of the short story and its author, and the title of the collection that you found it in, and its editor is there is one.  Please #NameTheTranslator for all translations.  It’s fine to mention the titles of other stories in the collection that you also enjoyed, of course.

Aim for a review that’s less than 800 words, but this is not a hard-and-fast rule because some stories need less and others need more.

I’ve four collections of Agatha Christie’s short stories I’ve been meaning to read for ages. So, I got them down from the bookshelves:

Poirot’s Early Cases – Captain Hastings recounts 18 of Poirot’s early cases from the days before he was famous from theft and robbery to kidnapping and murder – were all guaranteed to test Poirot’s soon-to-be-famous ‘little grey cells’ to their absolute limit.

The Golden Ball and Other Stories – bizarre romantic entanglements, supernatural visitations and classic murders.

Miss Marple and Mystery: the Complete Short Stories, an omnibus of 55 short stories, presented in chronological order 1923 -1958.

The Complete Parker Pyne, Private Eye – this edition brings together all 14 stories featuring the rather fat and unconventional Mr Parker Pyne.

Top 5 Tuesday:Top 5 books with sizes in the titles

Published on by Margaret7 Comments

Top 5 Tuesday was created by Shanah at Bionic Book Worm, and it is now being hosted by Meeghan at Meeghan Reads. You can see the Top 5 Tuesday topics for the whole of 2025 here. 

Today the topic is top 5 books with sizes in the titles.

These are all books I’ve read with links to my posts on them:

Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan. This won the 2022 Orwell Prize for Political Fiction, an award for outstanding novels and collections of short stories, first published in the UK or Ireland, that illuminate major social and political themes, present or past, through the art of narrative. It also won the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year 2022.

It is 1985 in a small Irish town. During the weeks leading up to Christmas, Bill Furlong, a coal merchant and family man faces into his busiest season. Early one morning, while delivering an order to the local convent, Bill makes a discovery which forces him to confront both his past and the complicit silences of a town controlled by the church.

Claire Keegan’s style of writing is a refreshing change from so many of the long and complicated books I so often read. It is precise, focused, and beautifully written bringing her characters to life – these are real, ordinary people, living ordinary lives in 1980s Ireland. And the detail is there too in all the particulars of everyday life – it packs a lot into its pages. 

Our Longest Days: A People’s History of the Second World War by the writers of Mass Observation. For six years the people of Britain endured bombs and the threat of invasion, and more than 140,000 civilians were killed or seriously wounded. Men and women were called to serve in the armed forces in record numbers, and everyone experienced air raids and rationing. In these terrible times, volunteers of almost every age, class and occupation wrote diaries for the “Mass Observation” project, which was set up in the 1930s to collect the voices of ordinary men and women.

Using many diaries that have never been published before, this book tells the story of the war – the military conflict, and, mainly, life on the home front – through these voices. Through it all, people carry on living their lives, falling in love, longing for a good meal, complaining about office colleagues or mourning allotment potatoes destroyed by a bomb.

An Awfully Big Adventure by Beryl Bainbridge. First published in 1989 and shortlisted for the Booker Prize, this is set in 1950, as a Liverpool repertory theatre company are rehearsing its Christmas production of Peter Pan. The story centres around Stella, a teenager and an aspiring actress who has been taken on as the assistant stage manager.

It’s semi-autobiographical based on Beryl Bainbridge’s own experience as an assistant stage manager in a Liverpool theatre. On the face of it this is a straight forward story of the theatre company but underneath it’s packed with emotion, pathos and drama. And it’s firmly grounded in a grim post-war 1950s England, food rationing still in operation and bombed buildings still in ruins overgrown with weeds.

The title is taken from Peter Pan, the play about the boy who never grew up, whose attitude to death was ‘To die will be an awfully big adventure.’ Bainbridge’s use of Peter Pan emphasises the themes of reality versus imagination, the loss of childhood innocence, and the quest for love.

Dirty Little Secrets by Jo Spain, a psychological thriller, set in Withered Vale, a small, gated community of just seven houses, outside the small village of Marwood in Wicklow in Ireland. On the surface it is a perfect place where the wealthy live their  privileged lives and keep themselves to themselves – until a cloud of bluebottles stream out of the chimney of number 4 and Olive Collins’ dead and disintegrating body is discovered inside. She had been dead for three months and none of the neighbours had bothered to find out why she hadn’t been seen all that time. But someone must have known what had happened to her – the question being who?

The Shortest Day by Colm Toibin, a short story about the mythical past, about the strange carvings found on certain stones, about archaeology, and about the unknown customs and rituals of our ancient past. It’s storytelling at its best – a tale of wonder and mystery.

Professor O’Kelly is writing notes about Newgrange, also called Bru na Boinne, a circular mound with a retaining wall that had a narrow passageway leading into a vaulted central chamber. There are spirals and diamond shaped designs cut into some of the stones both inside the chamber itself and outside the entrance to the passageway. It’s a burial chamber, a prehistoric monument in County Meath in Ireland, that was built around 3200 BC – older than Stonehenge and the Egyptian pyramids. It’s ringed by a stone circle, stones brought from the Mournes and Wicklow Mountains.

Meanwhile deep within the chamber there were whispers among the dead that the professor was coming again. They are concerned that he would discover the secret of the light penetrating the chamber on the winter solstice – the shortest day of the year. Some of the local inhabitants know of the secret but they never talk about it, except in whispers between themselves. When he arrives they put up a number of obstacles to prevent him from entering the chamber.