Title: The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding
Author: Agatha Christie
Type: Fiction
Page Count/Review Word Count: 368
Rating: 3.5/5
This isn’t Agatha Christie’s finest work, but it’s still worth reading if you’re an aficionado, especially if you actually pick it up around Christmas like I did. It’s only really the title story that’s actually Christmas-themed, but I did think it was a pretty good one with a few different surprises in store.
Most of the other stories were only so-so, but I did enjoy Greenshaw’s Folly, the only one of these stories to feature Miss Marple instead of Hercule Poirot. Poirot is fine, but he’s not my favourite. He was actually okay in these stories, but I don’t think the cases themselves were the most intriguing. I actually forgot a couple of them as soon as I read them, although there were a few good ones too.
Another standout for me was The Mystery of the Spanish Chest, in part because I felt like I’d read something similar to it before. It’s always hard to tell with Christie (and even Conan Doyle) because they’ve been imitated so many times by so many different people that it can be hard to tell whether they created the clichés or whether they fell into them.
I was actually talking about this with my Uncle Carl because he’s a big Christie fan himself. I’ve been trying to pick up every book she ever wrote and some of them were only published in America. That means that some of the stories are duplicated or even included in different versions.
All in all then, this is a decent enough collection to read if you like short stories and if you’re a fan of Hercule Poirot. If you’re more of a Marple fan like I am, you may be better off going for something like Miss Marple’s Final Cases, which I thought was fantastic. Those short stories showed off Christie at her finest, whereas these ones feel more average, if such a term can be applied to Christie’s oeuvre. And this book was still pretty good, it just wasn’t anywhere near her best. So yeah.
