1933: The Hound of Death and Other Stories

Publisher: Odhams Press, 1933 (UK)

Series: None

Category: Short story collection

Cross references: The Sittaford Mystery; Poirot Investigates

Warning, spoilers!

In a departure from her usual detective fiction, in The Hound of Death and Other Stories Agatha Christie offers 12 tales centred on supernatural, psychic and macabre themes. Unlike some of her other short-story collections – such as Partners in Crime (1929) or The Mysterious Mr Quinn (1930) – The Hound of Death doesn’t have an overarching narrative, or characters that run throughout the book, though there is an overall atmospheric link between them that I would describe as ‘haunting’. For me, this is the kind of book that requires you to come up for air between stories. The bullying and subsequent bodily takeover of Felicie Bault in ‘The Fourth Man’; the tragic tyranny of fate in ‘The Gypsy’; the haunting chill evoked by the ghost of a crying child in ‘The Lamp’, all show another side to Christie as she grapples with contemporary interests in the supernatural and spiritualism, walking a line, story-to-story, between rational explanations – such as in ‘Wireless’ and ‘The Mystery of the Blue Jar’– and otherworldly forces – as in ‘The Hound of Death’ and ‘The Last Séance’.

As discussed above in The Sittaford Mystery (1931), in her autobiography Christie professed a scepticism towards spiritualism, and she used superstition in her stories as a tool of manipulation – see for example ‘The Adventure of the Egyptian Tomb’ in Poirot Investigates (1924). Yet here we see, at times, an alternative approach; one that leaves resolutions ambiguous and open-ended, or even explicitly paranormal.

Perhaps as a result of this deviation in genre, the collection was not published by Christie’s usual publishers, William Collins & Son, but instead the book was taken by Odhams Press. Odhams had originally been a magazine publisher – with titles in the 1920s and 1930s including Horse & Hound, Ideal Home and The Daily Herald – later adding book publishing to their remit. Interestingly, the first edition of The Hound of Death was not available to buy, and could only be exchanged for coupons collected from The Passing Show, a weekly magazine published by Odhams, as part of a promotional relaunch of the magazine in October 1933. This was the first time that a book by Agatha Christie had not had a US publisher, although many of the stories appeared in US magazines and other collected works.  

The stories themselves had also been published variously in the UK during the 1920s – with titles including ‘The Red Signal’, ‘The Fourth Man’ and ‘The Mystery of the Blue Jar’ published in The Grand Magazine, ‘Wireless’ in the Sunday Chronicle Annual and ‘The Last Séance’ published under the title of ‘The Stolen Ghost’ in The Sovereign Magazine.

It might surprise readers to find, amongst these tales of superstition and the paranormal, the story ‘The Witness for the Prosecution’, perhaps now better known as a theatre show. It was only last year that I finally got to see the theatre production at County Hall and was entranced, right to the very end. Of the show, Christie remarked: ‘It was one of my plays that I liked best’, though she admitted to having been terrified of writing it and to knowing nothing about legal procedure.[1] Cajoled and encouraged by theatre impresario Peter Saunders (1911–2003), she was offered a barrister ‘on hand to clear up anomalies’.[2]

Thus she began to turn what she described as the ‘sketch’ that was the short story into the fully-fledged artwork that was the play:

I read quantities of Famous Trial series  [a collection of books providing detailed accounts of notorious nineteenth- and twentieth-century legal cases]; I asked questions of solicitors as well as barristers; and finally I got interested, and suddenly felt I was enjoying myself … I saw the nervous desperate young man in the dock, the enigmatic woman who came into the witness box to give evidence not for her lover but for the Crown. It is one of the quickest pieces of writing that I have done …[3]

Anyone who has both read the short story and seen the theatre production will know that the ending was to change between these two typologies:

I had to fight desperately for my chosen end to the play. Nobody liked it, nobody wanted it, everyone said it would spoil the whole thing. Everyone … wanted a different end – preferably the one used in the original short story I had written years ago. But a short story is not a play.

In the end, Christie won through:          

I got my end … some people said it was double cross … but I knew it wasn’t; it was logical. It was what could have happened … and in my view probably what would have happened … the psychology would have been right, and the one little fact that lay beneath it had been implicit all through the play.  

Though this story is more legal thriller than supernatural tale, it has its own haunting quality. Even in the lines that end the short story: ‘My dear Mr Mayhearn, you do not see at all ... I knew he was guilty.’

While The Hound of Death takes a different approach to many of Christie’s other titles, these short stories serve to demonstrate her ability to capture atmosphere and character in a paucity of words; to offer a vivid snapshot of a moment, or series of events, such that it feels that you a looking in on the lives of others, even if only briefly. The fact that these stories linger with the reader once finished is testament to Christie’s ability to tap into the thoughts and fears of her audiences, both in the 1930s and now.

[1] Christie 2011, p. 514.

[2] Christie 2011, pp. 514–15.

[3] Christie 2011, p. 515.