Tuesday 23 January 2018

Review - The Hound of Death

The Hound of Death is a collection of short stories by Agatha Christie.

I'm a big Agatha Christie fan, and I love her novels, and I've read other short story collections of hers. This one is a bit ... I would say hit-and-miss, to be honest. The title story in the collection, The Hound of Death, is ... odd to say the least, and has too few pages to develop its ideas.

There are a couple of really good ones in there - The Mystery of the Blue Jar is one that ended very differently than I expected it to, and The Last Seance was a really creepy little number.

The most well-known story in the collection at the moment is probably Witness for the Prosecution that was adapted as a two-part TV series with Toby Jones as the lawyer trying to prove the innocence of a young man accused of murder. The story itself is actually pretty slight and the mini-series took a fair few liberties with it, though it retained the original ending.

Out of the whole collection, The Witness for the Prosecution is probably the story most like Dame Christie's novels, while the creepiness of stories like The Last Seance have more in common with works like Crooked House and By the Pricking of My Thumbs.

Variable in tone and quality, it was still worth a read.

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