Poirot at His Most Ingenious

Hercule Poirot: The Complete Short Stories: A Hercule Poirot Collection with Foreword by Charles Todd

The short stories show Poirot at his most ingenious. The novels are wonderful of course, but in the short stories the clues are more cleverly concealed, the red herrings more cunningly displayed, and Poirot’s various personas—the crafty detective, the father confessor, the oddity, the friend and ally of police, and the law unto himself—are all well developed.

(Adapted from a DVD cover)

It’s also great fun to compare the details and spot the differences between the way Agatha Christie wrote these stories and the way they were adapted for David Suchet’s amazing television series. Some are almost exactly the same. Others have great differences and I always wonder why the writers think they are better than Christie. They never are. I do like that they put Hastings, Miss Lemon, and Japp in every short story possible on the screen, though I don’t miss reading these characters when they weren’t written into the originals.

I’ve read all these stories before, and it was great fun to reread them this half a year. There are 51 of these stories, about 900 pages worth of entertaining mayhem.

This is a book I prefer on my Kindle (I almost never prefer the Kindle to paper!) because short stories are not meant to be devoured all at once like a novel. They are meant to be savored one by one, and it’s easier to lay down the Kindle and pick it back up at the same place than to find a bookmark that isn’t going to fall out somehow.