A review by 1outside
The Labors of Hercules by Agatha Christie
4.0
Took me weirdly long to get through this short story collection!
Thought it would be a nice accompaniment to my non-fiction readings, a story here and there, but it turned out I didn't find it all that easy to tune into the whimsical tone repeatedly, since I was rarely in the right mood for it.
But I respect Christie for choosing the slightly dark-comedy sort of tone and sticking with it. And after all, it worked marvellously in TV form with David Suchet's Poirot.
I rated the stories separately, but now that I've read them all, I think a weak-to-solid 4/5 is probably a fair rating for the collection. I personally could have done without the Labors of Hercules framing...felt sort of shoehorned in in places. (Plus as interested as I am in ancient history, and as big a fan of Endeavour Morse as I am, I'm actually largely ignorant of the "classics" as the Brits call them.)
27 books in, this collection will certainly not crack my top 10, but it's still a well-written, occasionally funny, highly quotable piece of detective fiction writing!
Thought it would be a nice accompaniment to my non-fiction readings, a story here and there, but it turned out I didn't find it all that easy to tune into the whimsical tone repeatedly, since I was rarely in the right mood for it.
But I respect Christie for choosing the slightly dark-comedy sort of tone and sticking with it. And after all, it worked marvellously in TV form with David Suchet's Poirot.
I rated the stories separately, but now that I've read them all, I think a weak-to-solid 4/5 is probably a fair rating for the collection. I personally could have done without the Labors of Hercules framing...felt sort of shoehorned in in places. (Plus as interested as I am in ancient history, and as big a fan of Endeavour Morse as I am, I'm actually largely ignorant of the "classics" as the Brits call them.)
27 books in, this collection will certainly not crack my top 10, but it's still a well-written, occasionally funny, highly quotable piece of detective fiction writing!