I assumed I was done with Christie’s short stories, but I was wrong: there remained twelve more tales of intrigue to finish, which mostly land on the fun and frothy end.
The eponymous first story sets up the overall light feel of this collection. Mrs St Vincent, a genteel widow with two grown children, has fallen on hard times recently. One day she receives an offer that’s too impossibly good to be true: an exquisitely furnished small house available for a purely symbolic rent, whose old owner Lord Listerdale disappeared in mysterious circumstances. This story has an unexpected romantic resolution and some very amusing period-appropriate class snobbery. Though I liked the story, upper class notions of charity definitely made me roll my eyes, hard.
A few of the entries are written in the breezy spirit of Christie’s early novels like The Seven Dials Mystery, about Young Bright Things who get pulled into exciting adventures, often featuring a stunningly gorgeous damsel in distress (is there ever a plain-looking damsel in distress?). My pick of the lot is The Manhood of Edward Robinson, about a meek fiancé who, in an act of rebellion, buys a coveted expensive new car. His first drive takes him on an adventure straight out of Edward’s favourite trashy romantic novels, involving mistaken identity, diamonds and (what else) a bewitching young woman.
As an aside, it’s impossible for us in the modern times to imagine a world where you could buy a car and… simply drive off, with no license or driving test required whatsoever. The thrill and fear of those early days of the automobile must have been something.
In Jane in Search of a Job, we get another of Christie’s plucky heroines, who answers an intriguing newspaper advert and gets offered a job with some serious risks and whopping rewards – £3,000 for two weeks’ work! Though the setup takes up too many pages relative to the actual adventure, it’s a fun story with a typically feisty Christie gal.
The Rajah’s Emerald, about a hapless young man on a holiday looking for a place to change for beach swimming, likewise takes way too long to get going, to the point where I started losing patience. It did crack me up though that Agatha Christie came up with the name James Bond for her protagonist years before Ian Fleming did.
More serious stories in the collection include Philomel Cottage, about a young woman named Alix who keeps on dreaming the same disturbing dream about her new husband lying dead at the hand of her previous lover. It turns into a tense little thriller, with a good build-up of suspense and a surprise ending; I could easily imagine it as an onscreen adaptation. Accident is another tale with a neat twist I didn’t see coming, about a former inspector trying to prevent a murder after he recognises a local villager as an acquitted suspect in the poisoning case from years ago.
Despite the somewhat icky premise and a cynical ending, Sing a Song of Sixpence is probably my favourite. Sir Edward, a renowned criminal barrister, is roused out of his comfortable cocoon of retirement at the behest of a young woman he was once infatuated with (“made love” means something different now from what it did almost hundred years ago, but it still sounds creepy when applied to a seventeen-year-old). Magdalen, his old crush, desperately needs Sir Edward’s help after the recent shocking murder of her aunt. It appears that the culprit is one of the family, which understandably sets everyone on edge and creates a nasty atmosphere. I always like a mystery that’s solved by paying close attention to the details, and this is one of them. Interestingly, Christie revisited the classic nursery rhyme in her novel A Pocket Full of Rye, though its plot bears no resemblance to this short story.
I wouldn’t say that this collection is my favourite or one of Christie’s best, but it’s a fun and charming read before I tackle the sadness that is Curtain and probably revert to an emotional teenager.
yggdrasille.com 