The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding

by Agatha Christie

Part of Hercule Poirot

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This collection brings together five Hercule Poirot stories and one Miss Marple case. Poirot confronts a jewel hidden during a country-house Christmas, a corpse concealed in a chest, a suspicious dream, an apparent suicide and a murder whose victim’s habits reveal that the obvious account cannot be true.

Although collected in 1960, most of the cases preserve the country houses, diplomatic anxieties and social conventions of the interwar years. The stories show Christie varying the closed-circle form across festive hospitality, family secrecy and compact investigations, with the Miss Marple story Greenshaw’s Folly adding a separate study of inheritance and a threatened old estate.