Title: The Harlequin Tea Set and Other Stories
Author: Agatha Christie
Type: Fiction
Page Count: 284
Rating: 3/5
This book is a bit of a weird one because I basically only bought it to make sure that I’ve finished reading all of Agatha Christie’s books. The problem is that this is one of those examples where the books were published slightly differently in the UK and the US.
This is basically just the UK short story collection While the Light Lasts, but with a couple of other extra stories that are from other books that I’ve already read. When I picked it up to get going and read through the list of stories, I was pretty sure that they sounded familiar. It turns out that I’ve already read them all, and so it’s almost a bit of a cheat to mark this one as “read”. I certainly didn’t read the whole thing from cover to cover.
But I did get to dip in and out of some of the stories that I’ve enjoyed in the past, so that was quite nice. At the same time, I wasn’t really the biggest fan of While the Light Lasts, to the point at which my favourite stories in here were the two or three that came from other collections.
There are definitely better places to start with Christie, and in fact if you read all of the UK releases then you won’t miss anything out by skipping this one. I’m not even sure if it’s still available, which might explain why it took me so long to track it down. It’s really best suited to big collectors.
