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.
