The Mystery Of The Baghdad Chest

Hercule Poirot, Miss Marple, and Christie’s wildly unconventional investigator, Parker Pyne, all make appearances in The Regatta Mystery and Other Stories—a riveting collection of short stories featuring a host of murderous crimes of passion, pleasure, and profit. There's a body in a trunk; a dead girl's reflection is caught in a mirror; and one corpse is back from the grave, while another is envisioned in the recurring nightmare of a terrified eccentric. What's behind such ghastly misdeeds? Try money, revenge, passion, and pleasure. With multiple motives, multiple victims, and multiple suspects, it's going to take a multitude of talent to solve these clever crimes. In this inviting collection, Agatha Christie enlists the services of her finest—Hercule Poirot, Miss Marple, and Parker Pyne—and puts them each to the test in the most challenging cases of their careers.

Five friends get together to share a delicious dinner, listen to music and dance a little. They have fun and enjoy without excesses or drunkenness. The next morning, the butler is surprised to see a large red stain on the carpet on which an old Spanish chest is resting. When he lifts the lid of the furniture, he discovers to his horror that inside is the corpse of one of the guests, Mr. Clayton, with a dagger stuck in his neck. Hercule Poirot is summoned to help the attractive Mrs. Clayton unravel this strange mystery.

In this inviting collection, Agatha Christie enlists the services of her finest, Hercule Poirot, Miss Marple, and Parker Pyne, and puts them each to the test in the most challenging cases of their careers.

This study of the technique of Agatha Christie's detective fiction--sixty-seven novels and over one hundred short stories--is the first extensive analysis of her accomplishment as a writer. Earl F. Bargannier demonstrates that Christie thoroughly understood the conventions of her genre and, with seemingly inexhaustible ingenuity, was able to develop for more than fifty years surprising variations within those conventions.

An oriental prince begins an affair in London with a girl of dubious reputation, to whom he gives an emblematic ruby that disappears along with the young woman. Hercule Poirot is summoned to retrieve it. Posing as a guest at the Lacey family home, the detective will share a traditional Christmas to follow the thieves' trail until he finds the valuable jewel.

"Brings together nine rare ... tales of murder and detection that span nearly half a century of [Christie's] storytelling [abilities]"--Back cover.

Previously published in the print anthology The Harlequin Tea Set and Other Stories. Alan Everard, a successful modernist painter, is married to the beautiful society girl Isobel Loring, who eagerly promotes her husband's work. At one of her tea parties, to which she invites the London art critics, she unveils her husband's latest masterpiece—a portrait of herself. But Alan realizes the picture is lifeless. However, a sketch he has done of his daughter's godmother, Jane Haworth, is full of life and honesty. Alan soon discovers that the real contribution Jane has made to his life is not just her artistic judgment.