Agatha Christie: Christmas Crimes* (Helikon Publishing 2022)
Agatha Christie is called the Queen of Crime for a reason. Since her first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, was published in 1920, she has published 66 novels and 14 short story collections, which are still read with the same enthusiasm as when they were first published. She was one of the authors who made the crime genre great. Her books have been published in Hungary since the 1930s. There are many translations of her works.
Christmas was a very important holiday for Agatha Christie. So much so that it provides the background for several of her stories and she always wanted to wish her readers a pleasant holiday with a new book every year. Recently, several thematic volumes of short stories have been published (Midwinter Murder, Midsummer Mysteries, A Deadly Affair), but the Christmas Crimes, although the edition is in the same style as the previous ones, were made specifically for Hungarian readers and were first published in 2019. In this volume, you can read four Christmas stories: three with Poirot and one with Miss Marple as the protagonist.
Hercule Poirot’s Christmas is a novella that the author recommended to her brother-in-law, who complained that the murders had become too sophisticated and lacked violence and blood. Well, this one has enough of those…
The Christmas Adventure was first published in 1923 but was later revised by the writer and developed into a longer narrative. This was The Adventure of the Christmas pudding, also featured in the volume. These short stories were inspired by the writer’s own childhood Christmases, which she spent in Abney Hall, this huge Victorian-Gothic building, where rooms and back stairs were waiting to be explored, the tables were strewn with treats and there was a ‘real’ detective in the house.
The story of A Christmas Tragedy is told by Miss Marple in the circle of friends who gathered on Tuesday evenings to pass the time by solving crimes. In addition to solving puzzles for others, Miss Marple also tells stories herself. We could read this story for the first time in the short story collection titled The Thirteen Problems.
You can read more about Miss Marple soon on BogiWrites.
*my translation
