Last week, on this "From the Vault" feature, we took a look back at Agatha Christie's The Secret Adversary, one of her thrillers featuring Tommy and Tuppence Beresford. This week, I'd like to call your attention to another book by Christie - a book featuring her best-known detective, Hercule Poirot. It's a book of short stories about Poirot, and all of those stories are linked by a single theme: each story is somehow related to one of the original labors of Hercules celebrated in Greek mythology. The book is called, The Labors of Hercules. A decade ago, when I first reviewed it for this blog and the Classic Mysteries podcast, it seemed to me to be an original and very clever way to pull together a fine collection of short stories. A rereading has done nothing to make me change my mind. Here's what I said in my original review (slightly edited):
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What had Dr. Burton said last night as he left? “Yours are not the Labors of Hercules…”
Ah, but there he was wrong, the old fossil. There should be, once again, the Labors of Hercules – a modern Hercules. An ingenious and amusing conceit! In the period before his final retirement he would accept twelve cases, no more, no less. And those twelve cases should be selected with special reference to the twelve labors of ancient Hercules. Yes, that would not only be amusing, it would be artistic, it would be spiritual.
Those are the words and thoughts of detective Hercule Poirot, written by Agatha Christie and contained in the foreword to one of her finest collection of short stories about the little Belgian detective with the giant ego and luxurious moustache, in The Labors of Hercules.
I want to spend a little time talking about classic mystery short stories. Many of the finest authors before, during and after the Golden Age published many short stories about their detective characters. Certainly, that was true of Agatha Christie, for we have an excellent choice of stories about Hercule Poirot – not to mention Miss Marple, the Beresfords, and Mr. Harley Quin. Of those short stories, I would have to say that the twelve stories which make up the volume called The Labors of Hercules are among Christie’s best.
I have already outlined the basic premise for you: Poirot is thinking about retiring, but before he does so, he is determined to solve twelve more cases. Each of those cases must have some connection to one of the original twelve labors of the mythical Greek hero Hercules. It is a wonderful premise for a short story collection – and Agatha Christie more than fulfilled our expectations. None of these cases is what I would call “routine” – there is always something unusual about it, whether the circumstances or the very nature of the central incidents.
For these stories are interesting to a mystery reader because they treat a wide variety of situations – I can’t even say truly that they all deal with crime. Certainly murder is infrequently encountered in the course of these twelve stories. Sometimes it can be something as seemingly banal as the disappearance of a pet dog. Yet each case fulfills Poirot’s basic requirement: there will be some clear, if symbolic, connection to one of the original twelve labors of Hercules. And, if they are not always criminal, they are most certainly unusual.
Take the first of the stories – "The Nemean Lion" – which corresponds to the first labor of the mythical hero, who was ordered to slay the lion whose skin was impenetrable. For Hercule Poirot, the case involves the kidnapping of a Pekingese dog. He is attracted to the case when his curiosity is aroused by a small but highly unusual circumstance: he is hired, not by the woman whose dog was kidnapped, but by her husband. As for the connection to the original Herculean legend – well, that would be giving away too much. But it is fairly typical of the stories in this collection – and the links to the original myths are quite cleverly thought out. In "The Lernean Hydra," for example, Poirot must deal with the multi-headed hydra of gossip. The cleaning of "The Augean Stables" becomes a story about a political scandal.
I’d warn against being lulled into expecting too little - or typecasting any of them. These stories succeed because Christie is brilliant at devising plots that rarely go where you expect them to go – and you are likely to find yourself reaching the end of one of the stories only to realize that once again you have been properly hoodwinked and led astray.
As with most Christie books, these stories contain fair-play clues for the attentive reader, and they are meticulously plotted. As with most short story collections, the reader can dip into the book whenever he or she may have a few minutes to spare – the stories are all fairly short and are also quite satisfying. Perhaps because of the limitations of the short story format, I find myself with fewer complaints than usual about Poirot’s admittedly enormous egotism or his other irritating habits and characteristics. Overall, it is a collection that shows off Poirot – and Agatha Christie – at their best.
The Labors of Hercules is available as a separate collection, and the stories in the book have been anthologized pretty frequently, so your favorite bookseller should have no difficulty in finding a copy for you. I really do think it’s one of Christie’s finest.
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You can listen to the original podcast review in its entirety by clicking here.
Next week: The House Without a Door, by Elizabeth Daly.
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