Category: Support Your Library Challenge 2009

I borrowed The Hound of Death by Agatha Christie from the library. It’s a collection of twelve short stories, stories of unexplained phenomena, in most cases tales of the supernatural rather than detective stories.

Of the twelve stories I think The Witness for the Prosecution is the best. Agatha Christie later wrote a play based on this story which has subsequently been adapted for film and television. It’s the story of Leonard Vole, a young man who has been arrested for the murder of an elderly lady, Miss Emily French. He befriended this rich lonely old woman who left him everything in her will. He protests his innocence and is astounded when Romaine (who lives with him as his wife) refuses to back up his story at the trial. It is up to his lawyer Mr Mayherne to get to the truth.

I also liked the more supernatural stories – those with no explanation and those where the supernatural either have natural, scientific explanations or are plain con tricks. The narrator in The Hound of Death is unsure of how to view the events during the First World War where a Belgian nun, Sister Marie Angelique is said to have caused her convent to explode when it was invaded by German soldiers. He reflects:

But of course it is all nonsense! Everything can be accounted for quite naturally. That doctor believed in Sister Marie Angelique’s hallucinations merely proves that his mind too, was slightly unbalanced.

Yet sometimes I dream of a continent under the seas where men once lived and attained to a degree of civilization far ahead of ours …

… Nonsense – of course the whole thing was merely hallucination! (p36)

There are stories of premonitions, intuition or a sixth sense, stories of seances, haunted houses, nightmares, amnesia and a very strange tale The Call of Wings in which a millionaire hears a tune, played by man with no legs.

It was a strange tune – strictly speaking, it was not a tune at all, but a single phrase, not unlike the slow turn given out by the violins of Rienzi, repeated again and again, passing from key to key, from harmony to harmony, but always rising and attaining each time to a greater and more boundless freedom. (p269)

The music makes him feel he is being released from all his burdens as he is carried higher and higher. This story, with its mystical overtones reveals the power of music to transport the soul.

Years ago I read as many of Agatha Christie’s books as I could find, but they were all the detective stories – Poirot or Miss Marple. I was unaware that she wrote anything else, so these collections of short stories are a bonus for me. She really was a superb storyteller.

This year’s Agatha Christie Week is being celebrated at The Southbank Centre in September and on the English Riveria too, along with new radio productions and publications of previously unpublished stories – see the Agatha Christie website.

In The Thirteen Problems by Agatha Christie a group of friends, including Miss Marple meet on a Tuesday night and tell sinister stories of unsolved mysteries. It was first published in the UK in 1933, collecting together short stories previously published in various magazines. The first story The Tuesday Night Club introduces the character of Miss Marple.

The members of the Tuesday Night Club are Miss Marple, her nephew Raymond West a writer, Joyce Lempriere an artist, Sir Henry Clithering the ex-Commissioner of Scotland Yard, Dr Pender a clergyman and Mr Petherick a solicitor. Raymond wonders what type of person succeeds best at unravelling mysteries and puts forward that the ‘art of writing gives one an insight into human nature’, but Miss Marple questions him thinking that ‘so many people seem to me not to be either bad or good, but simply, you know, very silly.’ Mr Petherick thinks imagination is dangerous and that it needs a legal mind to sift through the evidence looking only at facts to arrive at the truth. Whereas Joyce believes it takes a woman’s intuition, such as hers – an artist who has ‘knocked about among all sorts and conditions of people’. She discounts Miss Marple thinking she cannot possibly know about life only having lived in St Mary Mead.

So they each tell a tale and are amazed when it is Miss Marple, sitting primly, ‘knitting something white and soft’ who comes up with the right solution each time by using her knowledge of human nature gleaned from observing similar cases in St Mary Mead. She sees similarities and makes connections the others overlook.

The second set of stories are told at Colonel and Mrs Bantry’s house, when the guests tell their after-dinner stories. Sir Henry is visiting them and suggests they invite Miss Marple to make a sixth guest at dinner, along with Jane Helier the beautiful and popular actress, and the elderly Dr Lloyd.  Again Miss Marple correctly solves the mysteries, seeing through the red herrings to discover even the crimes that no one even knew had been committed. As she says

a lot of people are stupid. And stupid people get found out, whatever they do. But there are quite a number of people who aren’t stupid, and one shudders to think of what they might accomplish unless they had very strongly rooted principles.

The Thirteen Problems is an easy read and the short stories are ideal for reading quickly and in isolation. They are not complicated and once Miss Marple starts her explanations the crimes are easily solved.

I particularly liked the first description of Miss Marple, sitting erect in a big grandfather chair she

wore a black brocade dress, very much pinched in round the waist. Mechlin lace was arranged in a cascade down the front of her bodice. She had on black lace mittens, and a black lace cap surmounted the piled up masses of her snowy hair.

Kerrie recently ran a poll asking Who is the Best Miss Marple? My answer was Joan Hickson because I liked her portrayal, and the way she spoke and behaved seemed to me to be Miss Marple. But even though she looked nothing like this description I still prefer to ‘see’ Joan Hickson as Miss Marple. A strange case (for me) of a TV portrayal taking precedence over a book.

Peril at End House by Agatha Christie was first published in 1932.  For once I wasn’t totally bemused and I was doing well, following the clues, or so I thought because I did solve some of the puzzles before Poirot revealed the culprit. But I hadn’t got the final solution!

Poirot is on holiday in Cornwall and boasting of his modesty to Captain Hastings, who is the narrator of this story. In his own words he is happy to be in retirement:

To sit in the sun – what could be more charming? To step from your pinnacle at the zenith of your fame – what could be a grander gesture? They say of me: “That is Hercule Poirot! – The great – the unique! – There was never any one like him, there never will be!” Eh bien – I am satisfied. I ask no more. I am modest.

But when he meets Nick Buckley who tells of her “accidental brushes with death” he just cannot resist investigating who is her would-be killer. Nick treats it all as a joke but Poirot is convinced that she is in grave danger. Indeed it seems as though he is right, especially when her cousin Maggie, wearing Nick’s shawl is shot.

But why would someone want to kill Nick? She lives at End House, badly in need of repair and “mortgaged up to the hilt”. Could it be Ellen, the housekeeper, or one of her friends – the languid, affected and mysterious Frederica known as Freddie, or her cousin Charles, who will inherit the house if she dies. Or maybe it’s the Australian couple renting the lodge house from Nick, who knew her father when he was in Australia. And what is the significance of the secret panel in the house – if it really exists?

There are plenty of twist and turns as usual with an Agatha Christie plot and not everyone is who they seem to be – identity plays a large role in this complicated mystery. I enjoyed it very much, not least because of Captain Hasting’s comments on Poirot’s outrageous vanity, such as this one:

His fame and reputation meant nothing to her – she was of the generation that knows only the great names of the immediate moment. … He was to her only a rather comic elderly foreigner with an amusingly melodramatic mind.

And this attitude baffled Poirot. To begin with, his vanity suffered. It was his constant dictum that all the world knew Hercule Poirot. Here was someone who did not. Very good for him, I could not but feel – but not precisely helpful to the object in view!

Have a look at the Agatha Christie Reading Challenge Carnival for more posts on her books.