A review by lesserjoke
While the Light Lasts by Agatha Christie

3.0

 Unless I'm mistaken, I have now reached the end of my long journey through author Agatha Christie's considerable body of novels and short story collections. In fact, this particular anthology was actually published in 1997, substantially after her 1976 death, but as it includes many earlier tales that hadn't been previously collected, I wanted to make sure that I checked it out.

(Weirdly, due to the vagaries of this sort of project, it also features two titles that I've read multiple times before: "Christmas Adventure" -- also known as "The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding" and "The Theft of the Royal Ruby" -- from 1939’s The Regatta Mystery and Other Stories and 1960's The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding and a Selection of Entrées, and "The Mystery of the Baghdad Chest" -- also known as "The Mystery of the Spanish Chest" -- from the same Regatta Mystery book and 1961's Double Sin and Other Stories. Their inclusion here is pretty baffling, given that the main selling point of the remaining entries was presumably that they hadn't been already republished anywhere after their initial magazine printings. Although maybe the repeated couple were added to shoehorn in Hercule Poirot, who would otherwise be absent from these proceedings.)

Still, the new material is fun. "Manx Gold" is notable for being the serialized prose component accompanying an actual 1930 treasure hunt arranged by the tourism board of the Isle of Man, such that the characters are shown solving the clues without giving away their solutions for any real-life participants. And both the espionage thriller "The Actress" and the tender romance "The Lonely God" constitute great examples of how effective this writer could be even when operating outside of her more famous whodunit / detective genre.

On balance across all its contents, I think I have to rate this collection as an average 3-out-of-5 stars, but I'm glad to have read it and that someone thought to gather those stories that might otherwise have fallen through the cracks of publishing history. Overall, it's a fine belated sendoff to Dame Agatha.

[Content warning for gun violence, suicide, and incest.]

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