Poirot Investigates
by Agatha Christie
Genres: Crime, Mystery, Short StoriesPages: 265
Series: Hercule Poirot #3
Rating:
Synopsis:The very first collection of superb short stories featuring Hercule Poirot and Captain Hastings…
First there was the mystery of the film star and the diamond… then came the ‘suicide’ that was murder… the mystery of the absurdly cheap flat… a suspicious death in a locked gun-room… a million dollar bond robbery… the curse of a pharaoh’s tomb… a jewel robbery by the sea… the abduction of a Prime Minister… the disappearance of a banker… a phone call from a dying man… and, finally, the mystery of the missing will.
What links these fascinating cases? Only the brilliant deductive powers of Hercule Poirot!
There are some interesting mysteries here, but I can’t say any of them really jumped out at me and stuck in my memory. The one where Poirot recounts a case where he fails and Hastings gently tries to pierce his ego afterwards made me laugh, though.
Another thing to be wary of with Agatha Christie is the casual racism that gets sprinkled around. I noticed it quite a bit in these short stories.
I’m not a huge fan of Captain Hastings, either. I just finished The Big Four and was dismayed to discover that Hastings was back for that one even though I thought he was safely married and out of the way. Ah well.
Nooo, really?! But someone promised me he was got out of the way soon. T_T
Me, I’m the one. He’s in 8 (of 33) of the novels and this collection, so it’s not that bad! He disappears farther on into the series. He’s so much better in the Suchet show, although I think I find him less annoying than you. XD
I’m a big Agatha Christie fan. I never gave much notice to Hastings, though… To me he’s just a backdrop of the stories – or maybe he wasn’t present in the books I’ve read?
He’s the narrator of The Mysterious Affair At Styles, The Murder on the Links and Poirot Investigates, so it sounds weird to me to consider him the “backdrop” of the stories! He’s constantly “falling in love” with a pretty face, commenting about what a fool he thinks Poirot is, and jumping to weird conclusions while thinking himself very clever, which is why I find him unbearable as a character.
Yeah, I think he wasn’t present in the books I read (or I don’t remember lol). I have The Mysterious Affair next on my TBR, and now I’ll might be a little biased against him. We’ll see…