Agatha Christie: Sinister Spring (HarperCollins Publishers 2023)
In addition to her 66 novels, Agatha Christie also published 14 volumes of short stories during her lifetime, which provided plentiful material for her thematic short story collections, which have been published in English by HarperCollins Publishing and in Hungarian by Helikon Kiadó since 2020. Since she wrote a story for each season and holiday, it was easy to group them for the new series. It is interesting, however, that the Christmas Crimes short story collection published by Európa Kiadó in 2019 is unique because it is a domestic grouping and was published in Hungarian only. This was re-published for Christmas 2022 with the same cover style as the new series.
This collection contains mysterious stories with a spring atmosphere or set in spring. It was published in England in 2023 and this year we were finally able to read it in Hungarian as well. These short stories are introduced by an excerpt from the Autobiography like in the other volumes of the series. Following, we can read 3 Poirot, 4 Miss Marple, 1 Tommy and Tuppence, 1 Parker Pyne, 1 Mr. Quin and 2 short stories without a detective in this book. I was especially glad that some of these stories were little known, so there was something to think about while reading.
As usual, the Miss Marple stories were my favorites, most of which came from the collections published under the title The Thirteen Problems, or The Tuesday Club Murders, where Miss Marple, her nephew Raymond West and his wife Joan entertain themselves with their guests by telling them about mysterious experiences they have had in their lives and the listeners try to solve them. However, the solution usually relies on Miss Marple, who knows human nature better than anyone. As his nephew notes: some people commit murder, some get involved and some are found by murder. Miss Marple is certainly belongs to the third group. Agatha Christie’s stories show that living in the countryside might not be as safe as we think…
