- from Agatha Christie: the collected short stories, published 2002
- ISBN 0-00-713681-1
I enjoyed both of these stories.
The problem with the Agatha Christie short stories is that they have often been published in a number of collections, sometimes even by revised titles. So far I have read 141 of them and so it is beginning to get quite hard to pick whether I have read one or not. My record of them is here.
The Dressmaker's Doll was first published in the December 1958 issue of Woman's Journal..
It was first published in a collection called Miss Marple's Final Cases and Two Other Stories in the UK by Collins Crime Club in October 1979
The doll is a Puppet Doll, who seems to have found her way into the dressmaker's fitting room. Nobody is quite sure how she got there, where she came from, but she seems to move from place to place at will. They become convinced that the doll is evil.
In a Glass Darkly was also published in the collection called Miss Marple's Final Cases and Two Other Stories in the UK by Collins Crime Club in October 1979. It was first published in 1934 in Colliers Weekly in the US, and is set just before and after World War One.
It begins when the unnamed narrator is visiting his friend Neil Carslake's house and meets Sylvia. In the mirror in his room he glimpses Neil's sister Sylvia being strangled by a man with a scar on his face. As Sylvia appears unscathed at dinner, the narrator presumes he has glimpsed the future and warns Sylvia of the impending danger. She promptly breaks off her current engagement.
I'm going to have to check these stories out as I've been reading a lot of short stories lately. Besides, I need to pick up on my reading of Christie's books though I haven't read "Passenger to Frankfurt" yet.
ReplyDeleteKerrie - I've always thought that Christie explored all sorts of different ideas when she was writing short stories. They're quite diverse. But it is a bit hard to keep track of them all since, as you say, they're published in more than one collection.
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