A collection of eight short stories featuring Hercule Poirot as well as some of Christie’s less-known detectives. You could generously describe it as eclectic, but “random” feels far more accurate.
I wouldn’t say exactly that the publishers were scraping the bottom of the barrel with this collection, however it’s really hard to discern any organising principle here other than the rule of two: two stories each for Hercule Poirot, Mr Parker Pyne, and the duo of Mr Satterthwaite and Mr Harley Quin.
The two Poirot stories are mostly interesting for being early versions that were later reworked and improved on by Christie. The Second Gong is a locked-room mystery set in the country estate of an eccentric aristocrat, who fails to come out of his study in time for dinner. The plot and characters of the story are remarkably close to its later incarnation, a novella titled Dead Man’s Mirror, but the identity of the murderer was completely changed in the latter, and the motive was re-written for the better into something much more personal and powerful.
Yellow Iris meanwhile shares DNA with Sparkling Cyanide, a novel dealing with a suicide of a beautiful young woman that’s suspected to be a murder by her husband. In this early version, Poirot receives a phone call from a mysterious woman, who fears that something terrible is about to happen at a commemorative dinner for the host’s wife, who died of cyanide poisoning exactly four years ago. Interestingly, Christie ditched Poirot from the full-length novel; I like Sparkling Cyanide just fine without the little Belgian so fair call I guess.
I’ve already read the two Parker Pyne stories in the separate Pyne collection, but was happy to re-visit them regardless. In Problem at Pollensa Bay, Mr Pyne goes on a holiday to Majorca and ends up helping out a young couple with a disapproving mother problem. In The Regatta Mystery, Mr Pyne solves the puzzling disappearance of a precious diamond from a room that no one enters or leaves. I probably appreciated these two light and charming stories even more next to the stories that are obviously less fully formed and refined.
I wasn’t in the least surprised to learn that The Harlequin Tea Set, the first of Mr Quin stories in the collection, was written about four decades later than the rest, in 1971. It takes ages to get going and is padded out with rambling paragraphs characteristic of late-period Christie. It was still fun to catch up with Mr Satterthwaite and Mr Quin years after their memorable parting at the end of Harlequin’s Lane, and this reunion has more of the same eerie, slightly supernatural vibe that sets this series apart. Here, Mr Quin’s sudden re-appearance alerts Mr Satterthwaite that something is amiss with the family of an old friend he’s about to visit.
In the second story, The Love Detectives, Mr Satterthwaite is visiting his friend Colonel Melrose when they receive a shocking news of a murder close by, and who do they happen to pick up on the way but the mysterious Mr Quin, eternally preoccupied with lovers as well as death. Here, a couple of lovers each separately confess to murder… but what is really going on? I had a fair idea of what was going on, as would anyone who read Christie’s later novel, The Murder at the Vicarage, which has a virtually identical plot twist.
The remaining two stories are not mysteries and can be loosely described as the stories of women faced with a difficult choice; why they were included here is anyone’s guess. Next To A Dog, about a young woman who must choose between a loveless marriage and giving up her old beloved terrier, is a truly baffling story that seems to exist for no other reason than indulging Christie’s love for dogs in general and wire-haired terriers in particular. Magnolia Blossom explores the dilemma of a married woman, caught between the desire to run away with her lover and loyalty to her husband fallen on hard times. While it’s at least more focused than the dog story, it’s still a weird choice to wrap up this collection.
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