If you want to find a murderer, you hire Hercule Poirot. If you’ve got a problem and no one else can help (and if you can find them) you hire the A-Team. But if you’re feeling kind of tedious and life is seriously mediocre (and you can’t get aboard a Boeing*), then the man you need is Parker Pyne.
Parker Pyne offers a unique service. If your life is missing something, if you can’t find the happiness that you are searching for, then he will arrange to find it for you. Oh, and while touring the Middle East, he’ll solve a murder or six…
Well, this was odd. John and Brad, when they discovered to their horror that I hadn’t read this collection of Christie short stories, strongly recommended that I read it. So I did and… well, halfway through and I was convinced that I was the victim of a wind-up.
The first six stories, all titled “The Case Of The…” are not traditional mysteries in any way, shape or form. Basically someone comes to see Pyne, tells him what is missing in their life, what they need to make them happy, and he sorts it out in an oddish way, with some of them having something of a twist (twist might be too strong a word – a turn perhaps) at the end. But these are strange stories. I did like the ending of “The Case Of The Discontented Soldier” but even the oddest story, “The Case Of The Rich Woman” is pretty obvious fare. What might have helped is if there had been more of a thread running through the tales – the first has Pyne’s employee Claude bemoaning playing the role of gigolo, but next time we see him, there’s nothing mentioned about it. I was hoping for something along the lines of the Radfords’ Death And The Professor, but as my blogging buddy pointed out, these were first published separately in magazines, not as a coherent entity.
What is interesting is that the majority of the first six stories – where, it should be said, Parker Pyne does sod-all Investigating – were first published in the UK in a magazine called “Woman’s Pictorial”, described by one website as a magazine of “housekeeping and dress patterns”, probably not the venue for stories of murder.
The second six stories were published in Pall Mall magazine, three per issue under the subheadings “The Arabian Nights of Parker Pyne” and “More Arabian Nights of Parker Pyne”. These are all “proper” mysteries and they are really good. Christie is often accused of not excelling in the short format, but these six are examples of her at her best. Pyne is investigating things here as he traverses the Middle East, presumably walking in the steps of Christie herself, and the venue is used to good effect. The puzzles are effective and “The Oracle At Delphi” in particular contains an excellent sting in the tale.
So very much a game of two halves. If you’re not getting on with the first stories, jump to the second half of the book. You won’t regret it.
*If anyone gets this reference, I’ll let my wife watch another episode of it…
In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel 
I abandoned this book halfway through in bewilderment 35 years ago- may be time to give it another go?
Incidentally, who employed Miss Lemon first, or did Hercules and Parker Pyne share her in the extended ACU?
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Is it even the same Miss Lemon? People assume it is, but we don’t get her forename here, iirc. But Payne was years before her first Poirot appearance.
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It was interesting to learn which magazines the stories were originally published in, as I think you’re right that they may have influenced the nature of the plots. Good question would be whether Christie wrote the stories and then decided who to submit to, or whether she considered the market and then wrote stories to meet its demands.
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I read all of the Christie short story collections about 15 years ago. To my surprise, my favorite ended up being The Hound of Death, her collection of supernatural stories.
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It’s not high on my list of things to read – not a fan of things that go bump in the night…
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The High Life!
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Indeed…
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I read this collection what seems like an eternity ago and recall feeling rather lukewarm about it. However some years ago I came across a TV adaptation of two of the stories as part of the TV anthology The Agatha Christie Hour: The Case of the Middle-Aged Wife and The Case of the Discontented Soldier. I find it weird, that they chose to adapt these two early stories rather than going with some of the stronger, more mystery-oriented ones, but then perhaps they had plans to film the entire Parker Pyne series.
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I remember as a kid being hugely disappointed when I got a box set of Christie adaptations and thought I’d found a new detective in Parker Pyne, only for the first episode to be some weird romance tale about a discontented soldier having “adventures” manufactured for him by an old man he hires. It seemed to make precious little sense and felt like something out of one of my Nan’s magazines. I’ll have to give Parker Pyne another go.
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Just read the ones not called “The Case Of”. Although I did quite like the “twist” at the end of the soldier story
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I loved the PP stories when I was a kid but when I’ve reread them as an adult I’ve been slightly disappointed. I also loved the Hound of Death stories – they’re not particularly horror-based, they’re very much of their time, when people were essentially confused by all this new-fangled psychiatry and whether it explained stuff that’d been seen as supernatural for centuries. Hence GA fiction often has séances, the odd bit of ESP (or is it?), telepathy… that sort of thing. I can’t actually remember which stories are in HOD as nowadays I just have a volume of all Christie’s non-series short stories. However HOD does include Witness for the Prosecution, if I remember rightly.
I might give PP another go sometime soon, I’ve got the omnibus edition, which adds two more stories (Regatta Mystery and Problem at Pollensa Bay).
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