As my next step for reading Agatha Christie’s first decade in order, I decided to scoop up Poirot Investigates – a collection of her short stories first published in The Sketch magazine. I could have gone straight on to her next novel, The Man in the Brown Suit (1924), but it seemed worthwhile to understand what Christie was putting out in the year leading up to it. The stories of Poirot Investigates were released between March and October of 1923, unless you factor in the three stories included in the US edition, in which case they stretch on an additional month to November. In that way, this overlaps nicely with my recent reading of The Murder on the Links (1923).
Poirot Investigates doesn’t include all of the short stories that Christie published in The Sketch throughout 1923. For that, you’d need to factor in Poirot’s Early Cases, which wasn’t released until 1974 (although the stories had already been released in various other collections – The Regatta Mystery, Three Blind Mice, The Under Dog, and Double Sin). Nor are the stories in order of release; rather, they’re somewhat randomly scattered. Continue reading “Poirot Investigates – Agatha Christie (1924)”