Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
Just finished "Murder in the Mews", by Agatha Christie. This was her 30th book, and was originally published in 1937. The book contains four novellas featuring Hercule Poirot: "Murder in the Mews", "The Incredible Theft", "Dead Man's Mirror", and "Triangle at Rhodes". It was published in the US with the title "Dead Man's Mirror", but without the story "The Incredible Theft". A very good book indeed. Highly recommended.
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Instead of reading the canonical collections, I'm reading the three-volume Complete Short Stories set, which generally does an excellent job of putting things in proper chronological order, but not here. Some of the stories in
Murder in the Mews are expanded from earlier shorter stories - "The Incredible Theft" is a reworking of "The Submarine Plans", for instance - and
Poirot: The Complete Short Stories swaps the later version in without changing the order. The problem with this is that the continuity is all wrong. "The Submarine Plans" was from 1923, and "The Incredible Theft" from 1937 when Poirot's situation has changed (although in this particular case it's not all that relevant - there's no chopping out of Hastings, for instance. As far as I can tell, he wasn't in the original.). It's an inexplicable bad decision in an otherwise excellent collection.
I should add that the shorter versions are still collected in the three-volume set, but are tucked at the back of
Detectives and Young Adventurers rather than being in
Poirot: The Complete Short Stories.