Two Hercule Poirot Short Stories by Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie has the distinction of being the only crime writer who created two equally famous and revered characters – Miss Jane Marple and Hercule Poirot. I’ve read almost all the novels featuring both amateur sleuths, and I can’t say which character I like most. They’re so completely different; what they have in common is that they share an ability to solve complicated crimes, almost impossible for anyone else in the stories to solve. 

I’ve discovered that I haven’t read many of the short stories featuring the characters (and I don’t think they ever appeared in the same story or novel). But I started stumbling over them – a link, an ad, something – and I know see that Christie did as well with her stories as she did with her novels.

 

Two recent Hercule Poirot stories I’ve read are The Incredible Theft and Problem at Sea.

 

The Incredible Theft was first published in 1937. It’s set in the classic country home of a lord with strong connections to the British Air Ministry. During a weekend gathering of friends and acquaintances, some significant plans for a new bomber are stolen. The problem is that everyone seems to be able to account for where they were when the theft happened. Solution: bring in M. Hercule Poirot, “that finny little foreigner,” to solve the case. And he does in a classic Agatha Christie fashion.

 

Agatha Christie

Problem at Sea was first published in 1939. A group of ocean voyagers are in route to Alexandria, Egypt, include M. Poirot. He watches all the conversations and interactions carefully, because something is clearly off. When a woman is found dead in her locked cabin, thee case seems to have no suspects at all; even Poirot heard her calling out, saying she was staying behind while others visited the port. But once again, he employs those “little gray cells” to solve the puzzle.

 

Both stories are approaching 90 years old, but it says something about Christie’s skill that they still sound almost contemporary. Each can be read in under 30 minutes, making them easy, quick entertainment.

 

Related:

“The Lamp” – A Ghost Story by Agatha Christie. 

Two Short Stories by Agatha Christie.

Two Miss Marple Short Stories by Agatha Christie.

 

Some Monday Readings

 

The British Evacuation of New York and the Fate of Loyalist Americans – Keli Holt at Just Enough History.

 

Over a Century of Willa Cather – Bradley Birzer.

 

Blood on Our Hands – Brian Miller at Notes from an East Tennessee Farmer.

 

Stay Organized: Keep Track and Back Up Your Writing – Dean Wesley Smith.

 

Religion & Rhetoric: The Significance of Religion to the Patriot Cause in the American Revolution – Ben Powers at Emerging Revolutionary War Era. 

Two Miss Marple Short Stories by Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie wrote a slew of short stories. Many featured her celebrated detectives, Hercule Poirot and Miss Jane Marple, and a few included her detective duo, Tommy and Tuppence Beresford. And many were standalones, mysteries, thrillers, spy stories, and even a ghost story or two.  

The woman was a writing machine.

Two of her Jane Marple stories are “The Case of the Perfect Maid” and “The Herb of Death.” Both are vintage Marple. 

 

In “The Case of the Perfect Maid,” the village of St. Mary Mead is buzzing with the news – a maid has been fired by two elderly sisters living together, supposedly on the grounds of theft. Miss Marple’s own maid, a good friend of the fired woman, asks her to “put things right;” there was no way her friend would have stolen anything. And Miss Marple pays a visit, discovering what the rest of the village has learned – a replacement maid has been installed, ad she may be the best maid ever to grace the village. But something is off, and Miss Marple knows it.

 

Agatha Christie

In “The Herb of Death,” a group of weekend guests (including Miss Marple) are gathered together, telling stories. One woman tells the story of a great tragedy, in which a young woman died of poisoning after eating foxglove mistakenly mixed with sage. The odd thing is that no one else at that fatal dinner got sick. So, what happened? Miss Marple quietly beings to piece together what really happened.

 

In her lifetime, Christie became an international institution, writing scores of novels and stories and selling millions of books. One interesting fact: She wrote The Mysterious Affair at Styles, her first novel, after a bet with her sister Madge. After rejections by six publishers, it was finally published four years later.

 

These short stories are what we call “cozy mysteries” today. Blood and gore is limited; gn graphic scenes of sex or violence. They are period pieces – and they’re great fun to read and solve along with Miss Marple.

 

Related:

 

“The Lamp” – A Ghost Story by Agatha Christie.

 

Two Short Stories by Agatha Christie.

 

Some Monday Readings

 

Stack Underflow: Losing the Craft of Coding – Jarett Malouf at The New Atlantis.

 

The Passing of the American Century – Lee Congdon at Modern Age.

 

The 1776 New York Campaign: 250 Years Later – Daniel Welch at Emerging Revolutionary War Era. 

 

One of the Deadliest Persecutions Against Christians in History – Samuel Sey at Slow to Write.

 

Edith Cavell – Brussels, Dawn, October 12, 1915 – A London Inheritance.

Two Short Stories by Agatha Christie

I’ve been rediscovering, or actually discovering, the short stories written by Agatha Christie. Years ago, I read only a couple of collections of her stories. I focused on her novels – Hercule Poirot, Miss Jane Marple, Tommy and Tuppence Beresford. I’ll confess to being partial to Monsieur Poirot and his famous mustaches, but I generally liked all of her novels. 

A few weeks ago, when a notice showed up (Amazon and its algorithm own me) about a short story by Christie entitled “The Map,” it contained no reference to any of her famous detectives. In fact, it made no reference to the word “detective” at all. The description did suggest that it might be something of a ghost story. As it turned out, it wasn’t only a ghost story; it was downright borderline horror.

 

And now I’m hooked. 

 

Agatha Christie

The Golden Ball is a story about two people who unexpectedly become an engaged couple. A young man is lectured by his grandfather about proper attendance at work, and he finds himself outside of work on a busy London street. Driving by is a young socialite, engaged to a duke, no less, and she promptly invites him into her car, they decide they should get married, and off they go to the countryside to find an appropriate home. They do, but it is there that the surprises begin, and there are more than one. It’s rather madcap, reads like something light set in the late 1920s or early 1930s, and it’s great fun.

 

The Listerdale Mystery also concerns a house. A mother and her two adult children are formerly well-to-do gentr but brought financially low by the father’s unwise investment and borrowing decisions. They live in a cramped and rather shabby flat they can barely afford. The mother is worried that her son is becoming too interested in the nearby tobacconist’s daughter. The daughter is bewailing the interest of a well-to-do young man who wants to call upon her, but to see her living conditions would destroy any interest he might have. And then, unexpectedly, a fashionable property in Westminster in London becomes available at a ridiculously low rent, one even this down-at-heels family can afford. But gift horses are rarely what they seem.

 

Both stories are entertaining. They’re something of period pieces, but they show dimensions of Christie’s writing that are as entertaining as they are unexpected. 

 

Related:

 

“The Map” – a Ghost Story by Agatha Christie.

 

Some Monday Readings

 

Willa Cather’s Pioneering Women – Sarah Reardon at First Things Magazine.

 

The House Does Not Need You – Nic Rowan at The Lamp on Ray Bradbury and AI.

 

Mysterious Shapes Hidden Beneath the Amazon Canopy Reveal a Sprawling Ancient Civilization Much Bigger Than Researchers Expected – Sarah Kuta at Smithsonian Magazine.

 

The Ring and a Junction on Blackfriars Road – A London Inheritance.

 

The Gables of Elsinor– Henry Oliver at The Common Reader.

“The Lamp” - A Ghost Story by Agatha Christie

Hercule Poirot? Yes. Miss Jane Marple? Yes. Tommy and Tuppence Beresford? Yes. General mystery stories? Yes. 

Ghost stories? No. Except the answer is really yes.

 

I’ve read a lot of novels and stories by Agatha Christie. The novels wither her trademark and famous detectives. Her thrillers. Her general mysteries without a trademark detective. But I didn’t know she also wrote ghost stories.

 

The Lamp is a ghost story by Agatha Christie.

 

It’s not long, only about 13 pages. It was first published in 1933 in a collection called The Hound of Death. The book was available only in one way – by collecting coupons from the magazine “The Passing Show.” And there it sat, until 1971, when it was published in the United States in a collection called The Golden Ball and Other Stories. In 2013, it was published as a standalone ebook by William Morrow Paperbacks.

 

I was expecting a mystery. Instead, I got a ghost.

 

Agatha Christie in the 1930s

The story is not set in any particular time. It could be anytime between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth century. The only real clue is that the family is attended by servants, including maids, so that might push it back toward the ninetheenth.

 

A woman is looking for a house for herself, her young son, and her father. She finds one she really likes, but she questions the estate agent closely about why the house has been empty for 19 years. He finally admits that there is a story about a ghost, a boy who was left with servants while his father traveled to London. Unfortunately, the father died there, and it’s said that the little boy wanders through the place, crying.

 

The woman does not believe in ghosts. She buys the house, and the family moves in. And all seems to go well until her son and her father begin to hear noises. And see things. Things will not end the way she expects. For that matter, things will not end like the reader expects.

 

The title comes from The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. The woman’s elderly father quotes this passage:

 

What Lamp has Destiny to guide

Her little Children stumbling in the Dark?

“A Blind Understanding,” Heaven replied.

 

The story seems odd for a work by Agatha Christie. It also seems a little creepy. You’re not going to see Hercule Poirot using his little gray cells or Miss Marple knitting away listening quietly. Instead, you get the innocent if discerning understanding of childhood and the wisdom of age and how those in between can easily miss what’s really going on.

 

Yes, it’s an Agatha Christie ghost story.

 

Some Tuesday Readings

 

“Vivien’s Song,” poem by Alfred, Lord Tennyson – Joseph Bottum at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

Three Poems for Robinson Jeffers – Lucas Smith at The Sprawl of Quality.

 

Two Moccasins Tied Together – poem by Emily Patterson at Every Day Poems.

 

Fire in July – poem by Rosa Gilbert at Rabbit Room Poetry.

 

Some Monday Readings - April 27, 2026

The Hunger for the Real – Christine Rosen at Commentary. 

Who is Blake Whiting? – Andrew Lawler at The American Scholar on the most productive historian in publishing.

 

The Secret of Shakespeare’s London House – Joseph Pearce at The Imaginative Conservative.

 

Review: The Wandering Army: The Campaigns That Transformed the British Way of War by Huw J. Davies – Ben Powers at Emerging Revolutionary War Era.

 

Agatha Christie & the metaphysics of murder – Theodore Dalrymple at The New Criterion.

 

The right-wing case for social media – Alex Yates at The Critic Magazine.

 

Create a System for Consistency – Terry Whalin at The Writing Life.

 

The American Way is Under Fire – The Editors at The Free Press.

Photograph: Agatha Christie at work.

Some Thursday Readings

The kindest of ghosts: A new history of childhood reading is a treasure – Simon Evans at The Critic Magazine. 

Jeffrey Archer: My 10 Favourite Agatha Christie Books – at CrimeReads.

 

University Cancels Panel Because Author is a ‘Zionist’ – Joe Nocera at The Free Press.

 

John Thomas Smith’s Rural Cottages – Spitalfields Life.

 

J.D. Salinger and the Wounds of War – Via Soho at CrimeReads.

 

Discovering a Classic: The Mass of Brother Michel – Joseph Pearce at The Imaginative Conservative.

 

September Sketches – Brian Miller at A South Roane Agrarian.

 

When Did You Stop Writing? – Ann Kroeker, Writing Coach.

 

An Artist in the Ghost Army – Mikall Venso at Missouri History Society.

 

Of Course It Still Matters! Why Story Literature Today – Joel Miller at Miller’s Book Review talks with Henry Oliver.

 

Photograph: Agatha Christie.

Redcar Collector, a short story by Glenn McGoldrick, is free on Amazon Kindle today.

 

Saturday Good Reads

Earlier this week, we finished watching The ABC Murders on Prime Video, starring John Malkovich as Agatha Christie’s famous detective Hercule Poirot. It was a dark version of the original story, with an origin for Poirot that wasn’t in the author’s books. But it was an excellent production. 

I must have been 10 or 11 when I started reading mystery stories by Agatha Christie. She wrote some 66 mystery novels and 14 short story collections, and even three collections of poetry. But it’s her novels for which she’s best remembered. Today, the Christie mysteries are classified in the genre of “cozy mystery.” Lucy Foley at CrimeReads argues for a different classification, that the stories told by the grande dame of mystery are anything but cozy. She makes a good case.

There’s a lot of talk about socialism these days, and a lot of talk about green new deals and whether it’s less about green and more about socialism. Michael Kruger at Canon Fodder looks at what is being criticized – capitalism – and asks whether capitalism is really based on greed, or whether it comes from something else. At Christianity Today, Eric Miller reviews a new book about theology and capitalism that takes on what the author calls “finance-dominated” capitalism.

In the Department of "Best Laid Plans Oft Go Awry," Jan Askonas at The New Atlantis has a longish discussion of what happened when algorithms replaced people in curating news and social media. And the short answer is - a fostering of tyranny.

More Good Reads

Art and Photography

How Van Gogh's Sunflowers have inspired generations of British artists – Martin Bailey at The Art Newspaper.

In London, a Sculptural Offering to Gods Old and New – Justin Hopper at Image Journal.

Poetry

A Song to the Mansions of Heaven – Nicholas Samaras at Image Journal.

George Moses Horton – D.S. Martin at Kingdom Poets.

Cuckold – Joe Spring.

All the Hollowed Shells – James Matthew Wilson at The Imaginative Conservative.

Life and Culture

The Machine Stops – Oliver Sacks at The New Yorker.

Reading in the Age of Constant Distraction – Mairead Small Staid at The Paris Review.

American Stuff

Andrew Jackson: Our First Populist President – Jeff Taylor at The American Conservative.

Defining America – Mark Malvasi at Imaginative Conservative.

Faith

On the Road with Thomas Merton – Fred Bahnson at Emergence Magazine.

Embracing the Dignity of Human Life – Zak Schmoll at Entering the Public Square.

How to Handle Temptation at Work – David Winters at the Institute for Faith, Work, & Economics.

British Stuff

Meet My Friend Selina – Tim Challies.

Writing 

9 Reasons to Quite Writing – Rachelle Gardner, Literary Agent.

Tumbling Tumbleweeds: Sons of the Pioneers with Roy Rogers

(from the 1944 movie Hollywood Canteen)

Painting: Oil Woman Reading, oil on panel by Jan Lievens (ca. 1628-1633).