Deadly affairs

Deadly affairs

Agatha Christie: A Deadly Affair (HarperCollins Publishers 2022)

You may have read about the books of the Queen of Crime on BogiWrites before. This year, another volume of short stories was published by HarperCollins Publishers for Valentine’s Day in a beautiful edition similar to the previous ones. I received the book as a gift from my husband and read it right away.

There are 14 short stories in this volume. Poirot appears in three of them: the Belgian detective shows that he can still look behind the curtain and the small details eventually make up the whole picture for him. In one case, he investigates a murder that hasn’t even happened yet, saving two person’s lives. We can meet Miss Marple in two short stories. In one of them, she is completely brilliant and although she solves the mystery immediately, she is aware that she would not be believed, so she asks for help to prove her theory. In contrast, in the other short story, she is just recovering from flu and the good Dr. Haydock, to cheer up his patient, gave her a mystery. The adventures of the adventurous couple, the Beresfords, can be traced in three short stories, originally published in the Partners in Crime collection, in which we learn about how Tommy and Tuppence try to do some private investigation through loosely connected stories. I like that they often refer to other detectives, such as Poirot, Sherlock Holmes, or even Father Brown. Parker Pyne, a detective specializing in the search for happiness, shows in two stories that he really knows what makes people happy or unhappy. Mr. Satterthwaite and his mysterious friend, Mr. Quin, also appear in two stories, and in other two, we find no famous detective. One of these is not even a mystery, but a psychological essay.

Unlike the other two volumes of short stories, here we find a lovely and humorous excerpt from Agatha Christie’s famous autobiography, not at the beginning of the book but the end of it.