Agatha Christie is renowned throughout the world as a stunning crime storyteller, famous for her characters of Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple, among others. This book highlights Agatha Christie’s genius at both storytelling and characterisation, while focusing on her lesser known work - the short story.
Contents
While the Light Lasts (Harper Collins, 1998, ISBN 0-00-651018-3) comprises of a selection of Agatha Christie’s early short stories. They are as follows:
The House of Dreams
The Actress
The Edge
Christmas Adventure
The Lonely God
Manx Gold
Within a Wall
The Mystery of the Baghdad Chest
While the Light Lasts
Each story also benefits from an “Afterword,” placing each story in context and supplying extra information on Agatha Christie’s own thoughts about her writing. “Manx Gold” also includes a “Foreword,” in order to explain in detail the circumstances surrounding this very different, formulaic tale.
Huge Variety in Storytelling
A reader new to Agatha Christie’s short stories may well expect the entire collection here to revel in crimes of the murderous kind. While it may be true to say that each and every story contains a crime of some kind, the majority reveal crimes of human nature, of love, vanity and self-preservation, rather than Christie’s well-represented detective crimes.
The genres and themes covered here vary greatly, from the two detective stories featuring Hercule Poirot at his earliest, to two love stories, and everything in between, including supernatural-tinged dreams, revenge, tragedy, and the psychological power of “The Edge”. One of Agatha Christie’s most well-used themes, the eternal triangle, appears in more than one of these stories, and is used to great effect.
Characterisation v Plot
In general, this book as a whole displays the kind of characterisation which encapsulates a reader in the world of the story. The characters, their thoughts and actions become part of us for the time being, as we empathise, sympathise and moralise with them. The characters have the power to evoke strong emotions in both other characters and in the reader, which is testament to Agatha Christie’s excellent development of character and psychology within a story.
The female lead characters are particularly strong in this collection, although not always particularly likeable. The two opposing characters, Clare Halliwell and Vivien Lee, in “The Edge” are portrayed as increasing difficult to like, but their motives and feelings make them intriguing characters.
Agatha Christie does not shy away from pointing out the less favourable features of human nature, and does this admirably through the insecurities, greed and blatant self-preservation of two eternal triangle-themed stories, “Within a Wall” and “While the Light Lasts”.
Ironically, it is Christie’s most famous character, Hercule Poirot, who seems to be the least obviously developed of all the characters in the two stories, “The Mystery of the Baghdad Chest” and “Christmas Adventure”, but we know enough about this great man (as he proclaims himself to be) to establish his character as he goes about the business of solving ingeniously set-up crimes in his own unique and sometimes rather arrogant style. The plots appear to overshadow the detective somewhat, but other protagonists are amply allowed to show their true colours.
Another story in which plot appears to be more important than characterisation is “Manx Gold”. This does not mean that the characters are two-dimensional – far from it. But this particular story was written originally as a commission from the Isle of Man committee which was responsible for promoting tourism on the island. It was a treasure hunt story, released in five parts, as part of a real treasure hunt on the Isle of Man, and is, therefore by nature, plot orientated.
Any lover of the short story will revel in the variety displayed in this collection. The plot twists, together with the psychological insecurities of the characters and the honesty in portraying characters’ true feelings, be they good or bad, make these stories a wonderful collection. They portray Agatha Christie as the superb storyteller she is known to be. Most importantly, they display a deep knowledge of character, which move stories away from being just plots and into the realms of “reality” for the reader, albeit disturbing and unnerving, as we recognise some of ourselves in the characters.
