AgathaChristieSS24: January

By -

 Fanda at ClassicLit is doing a fun thing this year, and I'm going to join in.  It's the Agatha Christie Short Stories of 2024!   She has picked out two short stories to read each month.


The January stories are "The Coming of Mr. Quin"  and "The Adventure of the Italian Nobleman," an early Poirot story, and there's plenty of time for you to join in.


"The Coming of Mr. Quin" was published in 1923 (says my book; Fanda says '24) and was Christie's first published short story.  All the Quin stories feature him and Mr. Satterthwaite, who provides the point of view.  When Mr. Quin arrives, he doesn't solve a mystery; he simply asks a few questions and inspires others to solve the problem.  In this case, several people are gathered at a country home where, ten years ago, a friend of theirs killed himself.  Why?  The answer is crucial to two other people staying in the house...

I always like Quin stories.  They're fun, and very different from her usual thing.

"The Adventure of the Italian Nobleman" is a locked-room mystery.  One Count Foscatini is dead in his flat, and two Italian men had dinner with him and have now disappeared.  It's up to Poirot to figure out who the killer is.

I like this story partly for its description of the fancy modern block of flats that Count Foscatini (who is of course not a count at all) lives in.  They are full-service flats; you order your meals from the kitchen, located for some reason on the top floor, and they send them down in a dumb-waiter, course by course.  Did such a thing ever really exist??  Or was Christie indulging in daydreams about what kind of flat she'd like to live in?  And, since I have read Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London, in which he provides a graphic description of a fancy hotel kitchen of about 1930, I'm wondering what this fictional kitchen was like...eek!

 

Comments

  1. Michelle AnnJanuary 5, 2024 at 1:17 PM

    Service flats certainly were a thing. They were often occupied by well-to-do unmarried men, as as shopping, cooking and washing up (and housework) was a very time consuming job in those days, and almost impossible to combine with a full time job. Poorer single people often lived in boarding houses if they couldn't live with their parents.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. JeanJanuary 5, 2024 at 4:51 PM

      Thank you! I know about boarding houses but full service flats are a bit beyond my imagination...

      Delete

Post a Comment

I'd love to know what you think, so please comment!

Popular posts from this blog

The Four Ages of Poetry

By -
Image
  "The Four Ages of Poetry," by Thomas Love Peacock I am becoming fond of Thomas Love Peacock.  Besides his unbeatable name, he was a lot of fun.  Peacock was a minor literary figure of the early 19th century; he tried his hand at poetry but mainly succeeded in satire.  I read his short novel Nightmare Abbey last year, but at the time I didn't know that the young hero of the story, Scythrop, was modeled on Peacock's good friend Percy Shelley.  He and Shelley were quite close and Peacock was the executor of Shelley's will. Thomas Love Peacock Percy Bysshe Shelley "The Four Ages of Poetry," a tongue-in-cheek essay on the history and development of poetry, was published in 1820 in a new magazine called Literary Miscellany , which promptly died.  It would probably have been completely obscure and unknown--it nearly is anyway--but for Shelley.  Peacock sent a copy to his friend, who I guess didn't really have much of a sense of
Read more

A few short stories in Urdu

By -
Image
 Back in August, I got hold of a book of Urdu short stories translated into English.  It's a large book, so I wanted to read just the women authors for WIT, and that would still be a good amount.  August got away from me, and I only read one or two stories back then, but I've continued reading them since.  I've now finished all the short stories in the book that were written by women (luckily for me, there are short biographies in an appendix, since I could only tell from the name about half the time).  I'll just highlight a couple: "The Wagon," by Khalida Asghar, is a hallucinatory, apocalyptic story.  The narrator meets three strange men who are watching the evening sky and point out that it has become red.  No one had noticed until they said so, but the sky is now strangely red.  Then a smell arrives, so offensive and sickening that it causes real pain -- but only once it's pointed out.  And finally, a mysterious wagon, which may be the source of the s
Read more