The Pyne-Poirot Nexus, Part 2: The Labours of Hercules (1947), by Agatha Christie, Part 1

More of a shocker sort of fellah
Hercules battles the Lernean Hydra

In Agatha Christie's The Labours of Hercules (1947), the Queen of Crime produced her single best conceit for one of her many mystery short story collections: Hercule Poirot, planning to retire, decides to go out with a flourish, by taking on and solving a dozen cases resembling the mythical labors of Hercules. Seeing how the author transforms these legendary acts of brawn into masterpieces of the deductive art by her diminutive detective is most enjoyable.

Labours was first published in 1947, yet eleven of the stories had originally appeared in the UK over 1939-1940 in the Strand Magazine.  The last tale, The Capture of Cerberus, was rejected by the the Strand, apparently because it too much dealt, unusually for Christie, with contemporary politics.  A new version of the story appeared in the book in 1947.

Although The Labours of Hercules stories include both Poirot's secretary Miss Lemon and Inspector Japp (and, one imagines, it would have been easy enough to incorporate Hastings into them), Poirot's Labors were never filmed in the 1990s for the David Suchet Poirot television series.  Instead, several of the Labors were incorporated into the penultimate television film in the series in 2013.  I will be writing about this film and the rest of the final season of Poirot next week, along with the second half-dozen Labors.

Along with the Poirot novel One, Two, Buckle My Shoe, which was published in November 1940, the Labors in which Japp features constitute his last appearances in the Poirot canon. Did the Labors conversely see Miss Lemon's debut appearances in the Poirot canon? As we know from my last Christie Tuesday Night Club post, Miss Lemon was working for Parker Pyne in the early 1930s.  I don't recall this most efficient of secretaries appearing in any of the Thirties Poirot novels.

Has Hercule Poirot found his match in a lap dog?

In the first labor Poirot battles the Nemean Lion.  In Christie's hands this fearsome beast of legend becomes, most amusingly, a pampered Pekingese.

Christie also introduces a good character, the much put-upon paid companion, Amy Carnaby, who appears in a later Labor. Does anyone else think Miss Carnaby owes a bit of a debt in her conception to Dorothy L. Sayers's Miss Climpson?  Both are delightful individuals.

There is a tiny nod to this tale, one of Christie's most engaging, in the film version of Labours.

The Lernean Hydra is less original but still quite enjoyable. The tale involves a situation I believe Christie had used before, about a doctor suspected of poisoning his wife so that he might marry his pretty female dispenser; but it's all very neatly carried out by the author.

The "monster" in this one is malicious village gossip--a hydra with many heads indeed! There's also yet another Christie house servant named Gladys. A promising subject for a future thesis: why did Christie so often name servant characters Gladys?

2001 HarperCollins paperback
edition--a striking design, I think!

In a wry tweaking of the original legend, which concerns Hercules being tasked with capturing a hind with golden horns and hoofs of bronze that is sacred to the goddess Diana, in The Acadian Deer Poirot encounters a "simple" young car mechanic, Ted Williamson, "one of the handsomest specimens of humanity he had ever seen...with the outward semblance of a Greek god."

Handsome young Ted ingenuously asks Poirot to find his lost love: a maid to a Russian dancer who was staying with her mistress at a local country house party but has since disappeared with no trace. Poirot resolves to bring Ted's dear, Nita, back to to the anguished mechanic, in a Labor involving a good deal of Continental travel on the sleuth's part. This story, really a romance tale with a twist, was one of the Labors used in the 2013 film version of the book.

The Erymanthian Boar also takes Poirot to the Continent, specifically to an off-season, snowbound hotel in Switzerland.  This is a darker story than the others in the collection, involving as it does a vicious French murderer and master crook known as Marrascaud. It appears that this monster is holed up with Poirot at the very same hotel, which can only be reached by a funicular railway.  After the funicular is disabled (naturally!) Poirot is isolated at the hotel for several days with the other guests. Which one of them is a bloodthirsty killer?  Not surprisingly, this exciting story became the main basis for the film version of the book.

the fateful funicular

Christie goes highly figurative in The Augean Stables.  In the original Labor, Hercules is tasked with cleaning out an ungodly amount of crap from King Augeas's stables of assorted animals.  In Poirot's Labor the Belgian sleuth must put a halt to crap spewed out by England's gutter press.  Good luck, Hercule!

Hercules shoots the bird

I think that Christie has a great insight here, namely that where the attention of the salacious public is concerned sex scandals tend to trump any other sort of business shenanigans, yet the notion seemingly advanced in the tale that one should cover up crooked financial dealings by retired, presumably conservative, politicians in the name of keeping a "radical" party out of power surely is an arguable one in my view!

This Labour was slightly worked into the film, at least in my reading.

The Stymphalean Birds once again takes Poirot to a hotel--in Christie's fabled Balkan country of Herzoslovakia, no less--where something most untoward is occurring. This is a neat little twist story, involving an earnest young British politician and two ladies in need, that also was employed pretty faithfully in the film. Interestingly, it bears a certain resemblance to a P. G. Wodehouse Jeeves and Wooster story.

Well, we've taken the mighty Hercule halfway through his Labors.  More to come next week!

The Tuesday Night Bloggers: Agatha Christie, Week Three

Ready to do the carving?
Dr. Armstrong (Walter Huston)
discourses on crime in the
first film version of
And Then There Were None

The third week of our Club meetings already! Links to this weeks posts.

Bev Hankins, The Problem of Stand-Alones

Noah Stewart, Christie's Worst Paperback Editions

Brad Friedman, Doctor, Lawyer, Merchant, Chief: Professions in Agatha Christie

Moira Redmond, Christie Tropes

Jeffrey Marks, Collecting Christie

Curtis Evans, The Pyne-Poirot Nexus, Part 2: The Labours of Hercules (1947) by Agatha Christie, Part 1

Helen Szamuely, The Beresfords--Discuss

Enjoy!

The Inspector Furnival Mysteries of Annie Haynes

In addition to the four Inspector Stoddart detective novels of Annie Haynes, Dean Street Press has reprinted her three Inspector Furnival mysteries: The Abbey Court Murder(1923), The House in Charlton Crescent (1926) and The Crow's Inn Tragedy (1927).

Earlier this year I reviewed The House in Charlton Crescent here, and I also discussed a true life Victorian crime that is partially reflected in the novel, one involving the famous Inspector Whicher of Constance Kent fame and was perpetrated in Annie Haynes and her companion Ada Heather-Biggs's own house, decades before they lived there.

See The Affair of the Bracelet: Miss Brown and the Robbery at Radnor Place.

Posts about The Abbey Court Murder and The Crow's Inn Tragedy are to follow.

In the Shadow of Coleorton Hall: More on the Early Life of Annie Haynes

Readers of this blog will know that I have written here about how in the early 1900s Annie Haynes (1865-1929) moved to London, where she became a successful mystery novelist and lived for over twenty years (until her death) with the prominent feminist intellectual and social activist Ada Heather-Bigg.  That much I had determined some months back, but it was only this year, as I discuss in my introduction to the new Dean Street Press editions of seven of Haynes's mystery novels, that with the help of a couple of individuals in England, Carl Woodings and Peter Harris, I was able to determine something more of Haynes's fascinating family origins.

ruins of the great castle
at Ashby-de-la-Zouch, Leicestershire

From my reading of Haynes's detective novels I suspected that the author came from England's Midlands and it turns out she indeed did. Haynes was born in 1865 in the town of Ashby-de-la- Zouch, Leicestershire (very close to the border with Derbyshire, one of my earlier guesses for her home county, along with Nottinghamshire), the daughter of Edward (Edwin) and Jane (Henderson) Haynes.  Today Ashby-de-la-Zouch is known for its ruined castle (Ashby-de-la- Zouch Castle), once the longtime seat of the noble Hastings family.

Annie's father, Edwin as he was known (though he was baptized with the name of Edward), was an ironmonger and the son of an ironmonger, a Shropshire lad who originally hailed from the small town of Much Wenlock, where the family kept an ironmonger's shop. Edwin and his brother and sister were raised strict Methodists.

In 1858 Edwin's father, Thomas Haynes, testified in a prominent Much Wenlock murder trial, where thirty-five year old William Davies stood accused of stabbing to death his sixty-five year old common law wife, Ann Morgan, in Morgan's cottage. A fortune teller, Morgan was "rumored to practice witchcraft and to possess supernatural powers," according to author Nicola Sly in her book Shropshire Murders.

Locals are said to have whispered to themselves that Morgan had bewitched the much younger and reputedly slow-witted Davies into remaining with her and doing her bidding, though she was known to have subjected him frequently to foulmouthed harangues.

Evidently the worm turned.  Davies was found to have murdered Morgan with a large clasp knife sold to him by Thomas Haynes just two days before the murder. The bloody knife had been left on a dresser in Morgan's cottage.  Davies was convicted of murder and sentenced to death, but this sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, on the grounds of provocation.

Much Wenlock

Edwin Haynes's marriage to Jane Henderson did not end violently like the common law arrangement of Ann Morgan and William Davies, but it obviously was not a successful union of man and wife.

By 1861, when he was twenty years old, Edwin Haynes had left the family shop and moved to Ashby-de-la-Zouch, where he apprenticed with local ironmonger John Orchard. There he married Jane Henderson, daughter of a prominent landscape gardener, the Scottish-born Montgomery Henderson, who superintended the famous gardens at nearby Coleorton Hall, home of the Beaumont baronets. (The poet William Wordsworth once designed a winter garden for Coleorton Hall.)

Was all forgiven?
Iglesia San Bartolome,
English Church at Rosario, Argentina

After Annie was born in 1865, Jane Haynes became pregnant again the next year. Before she gave birth to Annie's brother, however, Edwin Haynes had left his family, under the name Edward Haynes boarding the ship "Uruguay" at Liverpool on 20 November 1866. In a development that reminds one of all those Golden Age detective novels where family "black sheep" depart England for foreign climes to start life anew, Haynes embarked to Rosario, Argentina (home to a large English community) to work on building railroads.

Once settled in Argentina, Edwin Haynes may have married again and had a son named Eduardo, who appears to have been a successful lawyer. According to a Haynes descendant, when Edwin died he left an island located near Rosario that he owned (appropriately named Haynes Island) to Annie's brother, Thomas, provided that he come live there.  Thomas declined to do so, so Edwin's English family inherited nothing from him. (Thomas himself became an ironmonger, learning the trade from his grandfather and uncle in Much Wenlock.)

Coleorton Hall

After being abandoned by her husband, the pregnant Jane Haynes moved with Annie into the dwelling of her parents, the gardener's cottage at Coleorton Hall, where she gave birth in 1867 to Thomas.

Annie thus grew up on the estate of Coleorton Hall, surely giving her significant glimpses of the life of the gentry, which she would later put to good use in her fiction. In 1871, when Annie was six, Sir George Howland Beaumont, 9th Bt., resided at Coleorton Hall with his two young sons and a Dowton Abbey-ish retinue of servants, including a governess, butler, footman, groom, stables helper, nurse, cook, kitchenmaid, three housemaids, coachman, gamekeeper, laundress, laundry maid, head gardener (Annie's grandfather) and two assistant gardeners, not to mention all the people who worked on the Hall Farm.

During his lifetime did Annie Haynes ever learn what happened to her father, of whom she would have had no personal memory whatsoever from her childhood years? Evidence from one her novels suggests that perhaps she did.

Coleorton Hall and grounds

In her horse-racing mystery, The Crime at Tattenham Corner, we find that the racehorse Peep o'Day, owned by murder victim Sir John Burslem, is sold by his widow, Lady Burselm, to one Ramon de Villistara, a big Argentinian horse breeder who owns a stud-farm north of Rosario. At one point in the novel, Inspector Stoddart pronounces that Argentina makes a good "hiding place" for absconded Englishmen....

The Pyne--Poirot Nexus, Part I: Parker Pyne Investigates (1934), by Agatha Christie

Are you happy?  If not, consult Mr. Parker Pyne.
                  
                                                     Parker Pyne Investigates (1934), by Agatha Christie

By all means, if Hercule Poirot is not available.

                                                     The Passing Tramp (2015)

When people praise Agatha Christie short story collections, Parker Pyne Investigates (1934) doesn't normally get a lot of mention, in my experience, but I think the book is both an entertaining collection in its own right and of interest for its relationship to Christie's vastly more famous Hercule Poirot canon.

Professionally, Parker Pyne is not a detective.  A portly, bald, benevolent-looking man in spectacles, Pyne retired from thirty-five years of work in a government office compiling statistics and went into the business of making people happy, for a fee.  "It is all so simple," he tells a client.  "Unhappiness can be classified under five main heads--no more, I assure you."

In it current form, Parker Pyne Investigates includes all the known Parker Pyne stories--all fourteen of them.  The first six were published in American and English magazines in 1932, the next six in same in 1933.  The original hardcover edition of Parker Pyne Investigates included only these dozen tales.  The last two Pyne stories, "Problem at Pollensa Bay" and "The Regatta Mystery," were published in 1935 and 1936, respectively, and later added to newer editions of Parker Pyne Investigates.

The first six Pyne tales, all titled "The Case of [something or other]," are very light, humorous pieces, all detailing how Mr. Pyne uses his wits and his organization to bring happiness into the lives of his various troubled clients.  The formula started to wear thin by the last two stories in this first cycle (the last tale, "The Case of the Rich Woman,"is truly bizarre), but the first four tales all have their points.

In "The Case of the Discontented Wife," Pyne must handle the problem of a middle-aged wife distraught over her businessman husband's infatuation with his pert typist.  In "The Case of the Discontented Soldier," he is tasked with introducing excitement into the life a bored retired army man.

Only one of these early Pyne tales, "The Case of the Distressed Lady," involves crime in any way (unless you count Pyne's outrageous activities in "The Case of the Rich Woman"). The next six Pyne tales are a different matter, however. Pyne goes on vacation abroad and the stories take place in various scenic Continental European and Middle Eastern locales, to wit:

"Have You Got Everything You Want?" Paris to Stamboul aboard the Orient Express

"The Gate of Baghdad" Damascus to Baghdad through the Syrian Desert

"The House at Shiraz" Shiraz, Iran

"The Pearl of Price" Petra, Jordan

"Death on the Nile" steamer touring Egypt

"The Oracle at Delphi" Delphi, Greece

All aboard!

These stories involve Parker Pyne in crime sleuthing: jewel theft in two stories, kidnapping in another, and unnatural death in a trio of tales.  Several of these tales have considerable ingenuity, especially "The Pearl of Price" and "The Gate of Baghdad." These two bafflers would have made fine cases for Poirot canon.

Of the last two tales, "Problem at Pollensa Bay" is a humorous human relationships tale and "The Regatta Mystery" is another clever jewel theft story.  The former takes place on the island of Majorca and the latter, a sort of locked room problem on a yacht, is set in Dartmouth, Devon, Pyne having finally made his way back to England.

One point about these stories that struck me immediately is how they reflect Christie's travels with her noted archaeologist husband, Max Mallowan, and anticipate, in terms of "exotic" settings, several Poirot novels in the 1930s: Murder on the Orient Express (1934), Murder in Mesopotamia (1936), Death on the Nile (1937), Appointment with Death (1938). Indeed, as you can see above, one Pyne story even is called "Death in the Nile" (though it is much different from the novel).

Also, "The Regatta Mystery" began life as a Poirot short story.  I don't know why Christie later wrote a Parker Pyne version of it, but that is what she did.

But Parker Pyne and M. Poirot have even more in common than this.  Two characters associated with the Poirot canon--the Belgian's highly efficient secretary Miss Lemon and and his mystery-writer friend Mrs. Oliver--made their debuts in Parker Pyne stories.

Miss Lemon is Parker Pyne's secretary (and highly efficient indeed), and Mrs. Oliver, though a bestselling mystery writer, likewise is employed as a cog in Parker Pyne's organization, albeit in a creative capacity.

Already by 1932 Mrs. Oliver has authored "forty-six successful works of fiction, all bestsellers in England and America, and freely translated in French, German, Italian, Hungarian, Finnish, Japanese and Abyssinian."

Mrs. Oliver seems at this time to have specialized in improbable Edgar Wallace style thrillers. Apparently she has not yet created her celebrated Finish detective, Sven Hjerson.  Must have been her popularity in Finland that led her to it!

When did Miss Lemon actually go to work for Hercule Poirot? We will look at this matter, and much more, in next week's Christie posting at The Passing Tramp.

Tuesday Night Bloggers, Christie Week 2

Tuesday Night Bloggers Links.  More discussions of Agatha Christie's work:

Brad Friedman, The Bloodstained Pavement, Part II: Agatha Christie and Variations on the Serial Killer

Moira Redmond, "The Acadian Deer," from The Labours of Hercules

Bev Hankins, At Bertram's Hotel

Noah Stewart, Early Dell Mapback Editions of Agatha Christie

Helen Szamuely, Christie and Servants

Jeffrey Marks, Baby up the Chimney

Curtis Evans, The Pyne-Poirot Nexus, Part I: Parker Pyne Investigates (1934)

See last week's Christie links here.

The Annie Haynes Revival

Seven Annie Haynes Golden Age mystery titles now have been reissued by Dean Street Press, respectively Haynes's four detective novels featuring Inspector Stoddart and her three featuring Inspector Furnival. They are available on Amazon in the US, UK and Canada. (Haynes's five standalone mysteries are forthcoming from DSP.) All the reissues have a general introduction by me about Haynes's life and writing, and the four Stoddarts each have an individual introduction by me as well.  (The publication for the three Furnivals was moved up, so I was not able to provide individual introductions for those.)

Some blog reviews are out now, to which I am posting links.  I found these reviewers quite insightful about Haynes's writing and am so pleased to see that the books are connecting with readers. It's great to see the books get such thought-provoking consideration from our blogging community.

http://preferreading.blogspot.com/2015/10/the-crystal-beads-murder-annie-haynes.html

https://crossexaminingcrime.wordpress.com/tag/annie-haynes/

http://moonlight-detective.blogspot.com/2015/09/the-devil-in-summer-house.html

Additionally, new information has come to light about Annie Haynes's mysteriously absconding father, and this in itself is like something out of a Golden Age mystery.  I will discuss this in a post to come about Haynes's family background.  It's been a lot of fun researching the interesting life of this Golden Age mystery author, about whom nearly nothing seemingly was known until this year.