Moving Finger – ‘re-read lately and enjoyed reading it again, very much.’
The list does not contain any great surprises and most fans would probably also select most of the same titles, perhaps replacing The Thirteen Problems and The Moving Finger with The Labours of Hercules and The ABC Murders respectively. Despite, or perhaps because of, Christie’s lifelong association with Hercule Poirot, there are only two of his cases included, while Miss Marple is represented by three. Each decade of her writing career is represented and no less than five of the list are non-series titles.
A further insight, this time into some of her favourite short stories, came two years later. In March 1974 negotiations began between Collins and the author on the thorny subject of that year’s ‘Christie for Christmas’. ‘Thorny’ because the previous year’s Postern of Fate had been a disappointment and, at the request of Christie’s daughter Rosalind, the publisher was not pressing for a new book. The compromise was to be a collection of previously published short stories. Sir William (‘Billy’) Collins mooted the idea of a collection of Poirot short stories but, in a letter (‘Dear Billy’), his creator felt that a book of stories entirely devoted to Hercule Poirot would be ‘terribly monotonous’ and ‘no fun at all’. She hoped to persuade him that the collection ‘could also include what you might describe as Agatha Christie’s own favourites among her own early stories’. To this end she sent him a list described as ‘my own favourite stories written soon after The Mysterious Affair at Styles, some before that’.
Before looking at this list it is important to remember that Dame Agatha was now in her eighty-fourth year, in failing health and a pale shadow of the creative genius of earlier years. She had not written a pure whodunit since A Caribbean Mystery in 1964 and the novels of recent years were all journeys into the past (both her own and her characters’), lacking the ingenious plots and coherent writing of her prime. If she had compiled a similar list even ten years earlier is it entirely possible that it would have been significantly different. Even the description of ‘early stories’ was, as we shall see, misleading.
Christie’s 1974 list reads as follows:
The Red Signal
The Lamp
The Gipsy
The Mystery of the Blue Jar
The Case of Sir Andrew Carmichael
The Call of Wings
The Last Séance
S.O.S.
In a Glass Darkly
The Dressmaker’s Doll
Sanctuary
Swan Song
The Love Detectives
Death by Drowning
Also included are two full-length novels, Dumb Witness and Death Comes as the End, although she acknowledges that the former is too long for inclusion. Perhaps significantly, in both these titles, like her recent publications, there are strong elements of ‘murder in retrospect’; Death Comes as the End deals with murder in ancient Egypt and Dumb Witness finds Poirot investigating a death that occurred some months before the book begins. On her list the titles are numbered but there is no indication that the order is significant. I have regrouped them for ease of discussion.
The first eight titles are all from the 1933 UK-only collection The Hound of Death. As Christie suspected, many of them had been published prior to this in various magazines, the earliest (so far traced) as far back as June 1924 when ‘The Red Signal’ appeared in The Grand. The supernatural is the common theme linking these stories, with only ‘The Mystery of the Blue Jar’, published in The Grand the following month, offering a rational explanation. This type of story was on Christie’s mind as, later in the accompanying letter, she explains that she was planning a ‘semi-ghost story’, adding poignantly, ‘when I am really quite myself again.’ Some of these titles are particularly effective – ‘The Lamp’ has a chilling last line and ‘The Red Signal’, despite its supernatural overtones, shows Christie at her tricky best. ‘The Last Séance’ (March 1927) is a very dark and, unusually for Christie, gruesome story, which also exists in a full-length play version among her papers; while ‘The Call of Wings’ is one of the earliest stories she wrote, described in An Autobiography as ‘not bad’.
Of the remaining six titles, ‘In a Glass Darkly’ (December 1934) and ‘The Dressmaker’s Doll’ (December 1958) are also concerned with supernatural events. The former is a very short story involving precognition while the latter is a late story that Christie felt that she ‘had to write’ while plotting Ordeal by Innocence.
‘Swan Song’, published in The Grand in September 1926, is a surprising inclusion and appears probably due to Christie’s lifelong love of music; despite its country house setting of an opera production, it is a lacklustre revenge story with neither a whodunit nor supernatural element. ‘The Love Detectives’, published in December of the same year, foreshadows the plot of The Murder at the Vicarage and features Mr Satterthwaite, usually the partner of Mr Quin but here making a solo appearance.
The final story, ‘Death by Drowning’, is the last of The Thirteen Problems, although its inclusion jars with the rest of the stories in that collection. Unlike the first twelve problems, ‘Death by Drowning’ (November 1931) does not follow the pattern of a group of armchair detectives solving a crime that has hitherto baffled the police. Miss Marple solves this case without her fellow-detectives and makes one of her very rare forays into working-class territory in a story involving a woman who keeps lodgers and takes in laundry. As an untypical Miss Marple story, it is another unpredictable inclusion.
Overall, the list is, like much of her fiction, very unexpected. Though the absence of Poirot can be explained by the fact that this list is an effort to persuade Collins to experiment with characters other than the little Belgian, there is, for instance, only one Mr Quin story, although she describes them in An Autobiography as ‘her favourite’; and there are only two cases for Miss Marple, neither of which shows her at her best. Why, moreover, no ‘Accident’, no ‘The Witness for the Prosecution’, no ‘Philomel Cottage’? And only three (‘Sanctuary’, ‘The Love Detectives’, ‘Death by Drowning’) can be described as Christie whodunits, albeit not very typical examples. The over-reliance on the supernatural is surprising, although this had been a feature of Christie’s fiction from her early days – The Mysterious Mr Quin, The Hound of Death – and is a plot feature, although usually in the red herring category, of such novels as The Sittaford Mystery, Peril at End House, Dumb Witness, The Pale Horse and Sleeping Murder.
In the event, the proposed book never came to fruition and, despite Christie’s reservations, Poirot’s Early Cases was published in November 1974.
Pre-dating both these lists, An Autobiography names yet another selection of
