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.
The collection shows Christie varying the scale of the classic puzzle. Country-house ritual, family inheritance, apparent supernatural warning and concealed identity provide different structures through which Poirot or Miss Marple tests what witnesses think they have seen. The stories rely less on historical background than on the social assumptions of mid-twentieth-century Britain, where class and domestic routine can hide motive.
Jacqueline Winspear
20 books
Rhys Bowen
53 books