BooksOfTheMoon

This is a fun collection of loosely connected short stories. The great Hercule Poirot is getting on a bit and thinking about retirement (and marrows). But first he’s going to go out in style, by taking on twelve carefully selected cases, each one mirroring one of the famous Labours of his classical namesake, Hercules.

The cases are lovely little stories, for the most part. Christie manages to construct surprisingly intricate stories, for the size of them, with only a couple of them feeling morally dubious to me (the one where Poirot gets the PM out of hot water with the media made me feel grubby, in particular). It did make me realise that I’m not as familiar with Greek myth as I thought I was as I had to google (or infer) several of the classical Labours.

Even in short stories, where there’s not as much build-up as is possible in a novel, I stayed true to type and resolutely failed to figure out whodunnit in any of the stories (although I came close once or twice). But if the journey is the point, I had fun travelling with the Great Detective.

Amy Leatheran is brought in as a nurse to the wife of an eminent archaeologist who is on a dig in Iraq. Nurse Leatheran senses that all is not well on the dig, but is still shocked when there’s a murder. Thankfully, Hercule Poirot is in the vicinity and is called in to assist on the case.

I really enjoyed this mystery, with its evocative setting and intriguing characters. As Poirot says, the key to the murder is the psychology of the situation – especially that of the victim, and how her personality affected those around her.

The book is narrated in the first person by nurse Leatheran, who is a fun character to have in that role. She’s very prim and proper, and has the appropriate amount of British distrust of foreigners, although she does fall into playing the Hastings/Watson role with remarkable ease.

Something that I thought was quite odd was how unsympathetically that the female characters in the book spoke about other women. There are several women involved, starting with nurse Leatheran, and all of them often speak badly about both specific other women, and the female sex generally. I wouldn’t have been surprised by this if the book had been written by a man, but it wasn’t. Both Mrs Leidner, the woman that nurse Leatheran is here to look after, and Mrs Mercado, the wife of another member of the dig team, are described in particularly, one might say, catty, terms.

But leaving that aside, the mystery was intriguing, I enjoyed the characters a lot and, as usual, I completely failed to figure out whodunnit.