Back to the Classics #4

I read this book for the 2019 Back to the Classics Reading Challenge

Classic by a Woman Author. I was going to read Persuasion for this category but this 1924 collection of short stories fell into my lap so I read them more or less happily.

Poirot Investigates – Agatha Christie

Over the years I’ve said rude things about Dame Agatha, for which, older and wiser now about the benefits of extremely light reading material, I retract with chagrin, knowing that sometimes a tired brain can’t handle anything heavier than a mystery. I have zero plans to read her novels, but I must say Hercule Poirot is one of the best PI characters in detective fiction and the short stories in which he stars are perfect gems, like the Nero Wolfe novelettes.

Hercule Poirot is similar to Sherlock Holmes. He is a thinking machine and vain about this superior deductive powers. It helps in the comical department that the narrator of this these stories, Capt. Hastings, is clueless buffoon, the classic dim-witted Col. Brain of Henry Cecil novels who does not quite grasp how dim-witted he himself is. The lively interplay between Hastings and Poirot is entertaining. 

These are short stories so Christie does not have any room for characterization, melodramatic padding,  or the complicated engines of death that plague mysteries from the Golden Era of Whodunnits. These stories, only about 10 to 15 pages long, are little classics, ingeniously and tightly constructed. Lest the reveals start to feel contrived, they ought to be read one at time over a period of weeks.