Used Bookstore Treasures

I bought this paperback at a church book sale. It was the best 50 cents I've ever spent.

Beware of People with Accents

I've finally finished a cycle of short stories and am glad to be starting the next novel, The Man in the Brown Suit. I'm behind on my reviews and will post some soon, but for now I'll give you a few brief impressions.

Poirot Investigates and Poirot's Early Cases were uniformly good: engaging but brief, clever yet not so clever that the readers feels cheated. The first Harley Quinn story, included in Master Pieces in Miniature: The Detectives, was very promising and I'm itching to read more of them.

The rest of the stories I read were contained in either Masterpieces of Mystery and the Unknown or While the Light Lasts and Other Stories. A couple of the lesser known short stories could charitably be called The Case of the Vaguely Foreign Boogie Man, but mostly the stories I read seem to be cautionary mysteries for credulous youth with a thirst for adventure.

It is unfair of me to judge the collection While the Light Lasts and Other Stories after only reading a few of the works. But, so far I understand why most of these stories remained unpublished in book form for decades. I am not saying that they are bad, they just aren't Agatha Christie's best works.

Short Story Round-Up!

I've competed reading the first batch of Poirot short stories and I'm glad I put The Murder on the Links aside to do so. First off, based only on what I've read so far, it seems that agathachristie.com was wrong: Hercule Poirot's Early Cases should be read before Poirot Investigates. Or at least The Affair at the Victory Ball should be read before Poirot Investigates at is references stories contained in Poirot's Early Cases.

Eventually I will review the individual stories here, but right now, I begin the second Poirot novel.