Agatha Christie Short Stories 2025: Mini Reviews for May

The Million Dollar Bond Robbery

This is a Hercule Poirot story, where Poirot and Hastings were asked to investigate a bond robbery. The story opens with Hastings remarking how often one reads about bond robbery those days. Then a young woman came with exactly the same case. Her fiancee, a bank clerk, had been asked by his boss to take a packet of one million dollars of Liberty bonds on board a ship, for sale in the United States. The packet was placed in a trunk, of which, only the trusted clerk and two managers had the key. Later on the clerk found attempts to force-opening on the trunk, and the packet gone! The ship was thoroughly searched to no avail. Who the theft is, and how they did it?

Upon investigation, Poirot found that the bonds were instantly bought by a broker. And that fact convinced him of the solution to the mystery. This has been a straightforward case, and not hard at all to guess.

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐1/2

The Affair of the Pink Pearl

The third story in Partners in Crime collection found Tommy as the star detective for a change! He has just bought a camera "for taking photographs of footprints and "all that sort of thing", while a client arrived. She's a young woman from Wimbledon, whose house guest had lost a valuable pink pearl. Her necklace had been laid aside on a table after the clasp broke, and she forgot to take it upstairs at night. The following day, the necklace was there, but without the pink pearl pendant. There's no doubt that someone inside the house had stolen it, but who? And how did they hide it so that the search revealed nothing?

As Tuppence questioned the servants, Tommy took photographs of the whole room. Both efforts weren't fruitless. Tuppence found a kleptomaniac who'd been hiding spoons on their muff, but Tommy deduced correctly the theft of the pink pearl. On the whole, it's a satisfactory story. I've been waiting to read one where Tommy outwits Tuppence, and here it is!

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐