It's funny--this book collects fourteen Poirot short stories that were published between 1923 and 1924, which was years after the first Poirot novel came out in 1920. Yet it feels like Christie was still developing Poirot as I read through these.
I wonder if a bunch of Poirot shorts spent a few years in Christie's desk before the success of the novels gave the magazines a better reason to publish them?
Another thing I learned while working on this review was that a lot of these early Poirot stories are actually in the public domain!
This short story collection was a lot of fun, and more varied than I expected. What I mean is that, of the fourteen stories in this book, nearly half of them aren't murder mysteries! That adds some wonderful variety, and allows us to see some of Poirot's early cases, when he was still making his name.
Poirot's vanity seems to grow over the course of these stories, and his "little grey cells" aren't mentioned until a few stories in!
Hastings is our point of view and narrator, and he's sympathetic but not overly bright. The prose is workmanlike and not at all poetic. Hastings himself is not as sycophantic toward Poirot as Watson is toward Holmes, but he still lacks the depth and independence of, say, an Archie Goodwin.
The dialog is perfectly fine and serviceable, occasionally witty without seeming to try too hard to shoehorn it in.
Unlike the novels, the short story format means the mysteries are necessarily less complex and so are the characters. Christie seems to be developing Hastings and Poirot, and pretty much nobody else.
The mysteries are frequently reliant on Poirot guessing some connection between characters. Often the solutions involve something that wasn't really described in the story. This makes them fun to read, but less believable as serious mysteries. You might like that or you might now. As for me, my desire to keep reading generally kept me going right through to the end, easily winning out over my desire to actually give each mystery a real try.
Which is not to say that there are no clever tricks or mysteries in this book. There are quite a few wonderful a-ha moments! Christie does an excellent job of throwing out a flurry of
This book is a fun read if you treat it lightly, but probably would be pretty frustrating if you tried to solve each mystery.
Still, it's the first Poirot short story, so if you like Poirot and haven't read it yet, you should definitely check it out!
As always, more spoilers in the appropriate chapters of the embedded video!
If you're more on the fence about Poirot or if you haven't read any of the books with him in them yet, you might want to try one of the full-length novels, maybe the first one, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, or the masterpiece Murder on the Orient Express (which is still under copyright). Poirot is just better when Christie can weave a more complex web around him.
As for this book, you can read the first eleven stories for free here, then check out "The Veiled Lady," "The Lost Mine," and "The Chocolate Box," which are also free but have their own links.
And if you're already on Substack, you might find it easier to subscribe there rather than checking here randomly. Up to you!
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