Problem at Pollensa Bay and 7 Other Mysteries

Rating:
Summary: these stories are not her best work--she's really a novelist
Review: Buy nearly any of the other Christie audiobooks created within the past few years rather than spend your money on this one.

It's not nice to be harsh, but I nearly couldn't finish listening to this set, because so few of the stories were compelling enough to even take my mind off the traffic during my commute. Although I like nearly all of Christie's novels, this collection of short stories seems to indicate that Christie really didn't understand short story-writing, or was churning out stories without much heart for it or perhaps much good editing-- at least at the time.

At the end of each story, I sat there feeling cheated--as if the ending had been rushed to fit into a set number of pages. It's more like reading one of those 2-Minute Mysteries than the bit of nice, warm, chewy Agatha Christie brownie of a mystery I was hoping for.

Christie normally excells at creating delightful (either good or bad) characters, whose quirks and social interactions we anticipate and enjoy. Her normally keen sense of social wit is rather lackluster here. These short stories suffer greatly from her inability or lack of time to develop the characters and the social setting within so few pages.

Also, there probably is a following for this character, but I find Harley Quinn stories simply silly, and will never read them again. In a short story format there is simply no scope for a novelist, who isn't trained to have the discipline, to get us to suspend disbelief at the ooh-aah supernatural Mr. Quinn. I enjoy a good fantasy or what have you, but these stories simply fail to build into anything and seem terribly impressed with themselves.

If you'd like to explore Christie's little known "non-star" characters to try something of hers you haven't read, I enjoyed Ordeal by Innocence and Elephants Can Remember (which features "Ms. Oliver", who represents Christie herself).