Agatha Christie: Midwinter Murder (HarperCollins Publishers 2020)
Agatha Christie: Midsummer Mysteries (HarperCollins Publishers 2021)
Agatha Christie’s first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, was published in 1920, and since then the author has become the Queen of Crime. Her works have been translated into 103 languages and, with 2 billion copies sold, she is the best-selling fiction writer of all time. Her plays have already been played 25,000 times and Mousetrap holds the record for the longest running drama in the world. During her life, she wrote 66 detective novels, 14 volumes of short stories, 17 plays, 3 volumes of poems and 2 autobiographical novels. She is also the author of romantic novels under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott. Hundreds of TV shows and movies, radio plays, comics and even video games have been born based on her works. Most of the murders she wrote were poisoned and three-quarters of her murderers were women.
The two thematic volumes of short stories contain stories set in winter and summer, respectively, introduced in both volumes by an excerpt from an autobiographical novel, An Autobiography. The author loved Christmas very much, so she wrote some stories where the background was this holiday season. In ‘Midwinter Murder’, we find not only these, but a selection of short stories related to the entire winter period. The ‘Midsummer Mysteries’ is the opposite: the focus is on the summer and the popular resorts. Both volumes are very enjoyable reads, especially when we read them at the appropriate time of year. In these books, we find stories starring Poirot and Miss Marple, as well as the adventures of perhaps the lesser-known Parker Pyne, Tommy and Tuppence Beresford or the mysterious Mr. Quin.
