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.
BooksPlease 