The Hound of Death by Agatha Christie

 

The Hound of Death by Agatha Christie

published 1933

 

My recent posting on Agatha Christie has been quite critical (Postern and Ordeal by boredom Innocence) so I am moving back to something quite different: early in her career, a collection of short stories, and a great favourite of mine.

I recently wrote about her Mysterious Mr Quin stories: Hound of Death was another collection that I loved as a teenager, also with a spooky supernatural feel. And, as with the other book, I reckon it stands up well: I enjoyed it very much. The stories are not connected to each other, and contain none of her regular characters.

The standout will of course always be Witness for the Prosecution – made into a famous film, and still being performed on the London stage today. It deserves its reputation as a clever, taut courtroom thriller, and probably is Christie’s best short story.

It is very unlike the other stories in this collection, though – other than sharing a grim and quite unnerving atmosphere. Witness has no supernatural strand to it at all – the other stories do, even though in some cases it is just a smokescreen, with a rational explanation for what is going on.

The title story is a weird SF kind of tale: best title and weakest content in my view. At the other end, The Last Séance frightened me into fits as a young person, it had the genuine frisson, and led to my lifelong fascination with seances in books (not in real life).

I always was made very uneasy by The Fourth Man (I can never resist a story told by a stranger in a railway carriage… ), with its tale of hypnosis and transmigrating souls. I still shudder to think. That plain title hides the story of Annette and Felicie and Raoul, and it is absolutely awesome in a horrible kind of way.

(The picture of the man on the train is by the great James Tissot)

Christie was good at keeping you guessing. The stories are full of manly ex-army types, and foolish young men, beautiful young women, golf, a gypsy, and a very scarey cat. But she has good recipes for mixing up the tropes: some outcomes will be predictable and some not.

The Hound of Death has a very strange publication history – it was first produced as a book which was only available by collecting tokens from a magazine. It wasn’t made generally available till 1936. What a fate, throwing away Witness for the Prosecution like that! Worth looking up on Wikipedia.

 The National Science Museum (of all places) has a few properly spooky séance pictures, my goto in these cases. The top pic is one of them, very much the Last Seance.

Second séance picture  – surely the story Wireless to the life (?death) -  from the National library of Australia