Poirot 15 – Murder In The Mews (1937) by Agatha Christie

“Good night for a murder. Nobody would hear a shot, for instance, on a night like this.”

Thus speaks the prophetic Inspector Japp to his friend Hercule Poirot on the fifth of November, as fireworks explode around them. And to no surprise, to the reader at least, the next day they are called to the flat of Barbara Allen, a young widow who has apparently shot herself. And that’s not all he has to deal with.

Someone has stolen some vital plans from the home of Lord Mayfield from under his nose. Sir Gervase Chevenix-Gore has shot himself when locked inside his study. And Poirot can only watch while on holiday to Rhodes as a love triangle develops into murder…

Yes, you wait nine months for a Poirot review and then you get two in a row. I know I’ve other stuff coming up, but I was stranded with my Kindle – it’s just more convenient sometimes.

So, this is a bit of an oddity. Four stories of varying lengths that was when I bought it, way back when, sold as a novel – the blurb on the back of my Fontana or Pan edition, I forget which, didn’t mention that this was a novella collection. It was “Murder In The Mews”, not “Murder In The Mews and other stories”. In the US, Dead Man’s Mirror took the title, and The Incredible Theft never appeared in the first edition. It’s all a bit irrelevant now as I don’t think this is for sale any more as this collection, just as the individual story in ebook form, or as part of the Complete Poirot collection. Although you can get The Labours of Hercules…

Lengthwise, according to my Complete Poirot, Murder In The Mews is 44 pages, Dead Man’s Mirror is 61 pages, The Incredible Theft is 41 pages and Triangle At Rhodes is 21 pages, so let’s call it three novellas and a short story.

Let’s take them one at a time, briefly.

Murder In The Mews is the last story to be published, originally in Redbook Magazine in Sep/Oct 1936. And it’s a bit of a plodder, to be honest. The solution is elegant, and you can see why it’s been used in a novella as if that was the reveal for a novel, then I think readers might feel a little cheated. Even with the reduced page count though, it feels like the plot for a short story and it feels stretched.

The Incredible Theft first appeared as The Submarine Plans in The Sketch in 1923. I don’t know if this version appeared elsewhere before this collection – sorry for the lack of info there – but as for this version… Oh, I could just say the same as I said for Murder In The Mews. Except for the elegant solution, this one is blindingly obvious.

Dead Man’s Mirror (1932) is another expansion, this time of The Second Gong (bit of a spoiler there) and it’s a bit stronger than the two so far. The characters don’t get enough time to breathe though, which means that the kick in the motive doesn’t quite carry the weight it should. It’s the one story that could possibly be expanded into a novel, but this rare attempt from Christie to do a locked room uses such a basic method that if that had been the focus, it probably wouldn’t have held the interest.

Triangle At Rhodes (1936) is by far the best of the collection, as it’s the only one that spends time developing the characters properly despite the shorter page length. It’s a story that knows that it’s a short story and, if you excuse the unlikely bit with Poirot rubbing suncream onto a lady’s back, it’s a really effective tale, which a distinct whiff of Evil Under The Sun about it.

So all in all, a mixed bag of a collection, with only Triangle At Rhodes really succeeding on all counts. All the novellas feel like they’ve been dragged out.

It’s hard to judge this against the novels, especially with two early stories and two more recent ones, but I think this is quite a skippable collection. They’re perfectly fine, but they don’t have the characters of her best work, and reading it back to back with Cards On The Table might have been a mistake.

Ranking Poirot (So Far)

It’s been a while since I’ve done this, and reviewing the list, I do wonder about some of the order. But the idea was to not adjust the list as I was going on, merely to add to it. So I think this is definitely at the top end…