1934: The Listerdale Mystery     

Publisher: William Collins & Sons, 1934 (UK only)

Series: None

Category: Short stories

Cross refs: Partners in Crime; The Mysterious Mr Quin; The Secret of Chimneys; The Seven Dials Mystery; A Pocket Full of Rye; The Secret Adversary

Warning, spoilers!

Though The Listerdale Mystery has no overarching narrative arc, as with Partners in Crime (1929), nor does it feature a cameo character who recurs throughout, as seen in The Mysterious Mr Quin (1930), it is, nonetheless, an incredibly satisfying short story collection. Published in the UK by William Collins and Sons in June 1934 (though not published in the US), the book was part of the Collins Mystery series, rather than the usual Collins Crime Club, which perhaps gives a hint as to the general style of the stories. If I were to pick a single word to sum up the theme of this collection I might choose ‘love’ or ‘relationships’, though such a selection is apt to be misleading, and though this thematic link suggests a cohesive assembly, it does not reflect the fact that the pacing and ‘atmosphere’ varies somewhat from story to story.

Take the eponymous opening tale (first published in The Grand Magazine, December 1925), for example, which centres on the realities of genteel poverty in the 1920s and 1930s, a time when the previously wealthy minor gentry, as well as retired professionals and unmarried gentlewomen, struggled to maintain their social status, existing on severely diminished fixed incomes. The situation was compounded by both the stigma of taking a job – attested to by Mrs St Vincent’s plea, ‘Not yet, dear … wait a little longer’, in response to her daughter’s declaration that she must get a job, ‘any job’ – and the desire to maintain a ‘respectable’ façade to keep up an illusion of wealth (and attract a suitable husband), despite the lack of funds to do so. The story also hints at the hidden malnutrition of such families and the impossibility of maintaining household staff, as had been tradition. As Mrs St Vincent laments:

The servants … would eat, you know … one would want them too – but that’s the drawback. One can so easily just do without things when it’s only one’s self.

Of course, the story is also awash with lines telling of the period’s inherent class snobbery – ‘labour members’ and ‘button manufacturers’ are othered as not being ‘one of us’, and when transported into a more ‘suitable’ setting, appropriate to his class, Rupert’s interest in the tobacconist’s daughter dwindles. Moreover, Mrs St Vincent, though considering Quentin the butler as a friend, clearly doesn’t consider him to be a man until, at the end of the story, his true identity is revealed and she observes:

His eyes were fixed on her face … they were, for the first time, the eyes of a man and not a servant.

Yet, for all of its reflections on the decline of the monied middle-classes, and a hint that this could be a murder mystery case – as Rupert declares, ‘there’s something very fishy about this business’ – this is a love story with a knight in shining armour, who not only allows ‘gentlepeople’ to live in the manner to which they are accustomed, but also proposes to the story’s heroine.    

Contrast this to the second story, ‘Philomel Cottage’ (first published in The Grand Magazine, November 1924) – a psychological thriller, which evokes the story of the real-life swindler and serial killer Henri Désiré Landru (1869–1922), known as the ‘Bluebeard of Gambais’, who was found guilty of killing at least ten women (possibly more), who he met through the lonely hearts advertisements in the Paris newspapers.[1] He would seduce the women, defraud them and then kill them, destroying their bodies by burning them in a stove in his homes in Vernouillet and later in a more isolated villa in Gambais. The link to this story is evoked in Gerald’s words: ‘Do you think it wise – Alix – this Bluebeard’s chamber business?’

Landru’s trial in 1921 generated massive public attention and would have been known to Christie. He was found guilty of eleven murders (including the murder of the son of one of his victims), largely based on his meticulous notebooks, which contained a list of his victims. Gerald’s notebook in ‘Philomel Cottage’ also echoes this detail of the real-life case. 

From there we leap over to ‘The Girl on the Train’ (first published in The Grand Magazine, February 1924), which feels like a nascent rendition of The Secret of Chimneys (1925), with the hero of the piece, George Rowland, an early prototype for Anthony Cade. Scenes such as the one in the hotel, where Rowland has a run-in with strangers who try to take the package he has been entrusted with, are deeply reminiscent of Chimneys. Both stories contain allusions to an obscure (fictional) Balkan country undergoing a revolution and, as with Chimneys, ‘The Girl on the Train’ contains a good dose of xenophobia – ‘George had the trueborn Briton’s prejudice against foreigners’; ‘The guard looked from one to the other … His training led him to despise foreigners.’ The final engagement between Rowland and Elizabeth, for both love and mutual benefit, also echoes that between Cade and Virginia Revel.

‘The Girl on the Train’ and ‘The Golden Ball’ (first published as ‘Playing the Innocent’ in the Daily Mail, August 1929), which also features in The Listerdale Mystery, share the theme of young and vigorous men falling foul of an older uncle who holds the purse strings. In both stories the young men are prone to overindulge and underwork, prompting ties to be cut between uncle and nephew. Intergenerational dynamics are a frequent feature of Christie’s work (see also Why Didn’t They Ask Evans? (1934)) as is the work ethic (or lack thereof) of the younger men, and as such one does wonder how much Christie regarded her younger male contemporaries as having something of a questionable attitude to work, especially when compared to those who had come before them.        

From one group of Bright Young Things to another, and ‘The Manhood of Edward Robinson’ (first published in The Grand Magazine, December 1924). This is a romp reminiscent of The Seven Dials Mystery (1929), and one of three stories within this collection that involves the discovery of a valuable jewel. Both ‘The Rajah’s Emerald’ (first published in Red Magazine, July 1926), and ‘A Fruitful Sunday’ (first published in the Daily Mail, August 1928) also see an ‘everyman’ encounter such treasures. The latter story took me down a rabbit hole about Woolworth jewellery, which has fascinated me since when, in my childhood, I heard mention of ‘Woolworth pearls’ in the Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats (1939) by T.S. Eliot (1888–1965) and couldn’t picture anything so desirable among the pick and mix at the Woolworths I knew! The original American ‘five-and-dime’ F. W. Woolworth Company opened as Woolworth and later Woolworths in the UK from 1909, expanding to some 130 branches by 1923. In the popular imagination, Woolworth jewellery became synonymous with cheap, replica items – costume jewellery that made diamonds and pearls accessible to all. It is in competition with the Woolworths brand that the ‘All English Fivepenny Fair’ of ‘A Fruitful Sunday’ are creating their imitation necklaces of different coloured stones and hiding them in punnets of fruit as a publicity stunt.    

From theft to murder and ‘Sing a Song of Sixpence’ (first published in Holly Leaves, the annual Christmas special of the Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News, December 1929). This story offers the more traditional locked-room mystery that we are used to, though the investigator in this case is the slightly lecherous retired KC, Sir Edward Palliser – he is certainly no Hercule Poirot. Although Christie revisited the same nursery rhyme in her novel A Pocket Full of Rye (1953), the two stories are totally distinct.

In ‘Jane in Search of a Job’ (first published in The Grand Magazine, August 1924) the plucky Jane Cleveland responds to a job in a newspaper advert and finds herself falling victim to an elaborate scam. Jane feels a lot like the Tuppence of The Secret Adversary (1922), young, adventurous and not afraid of danger. During her interview process, Jane considers the possibility that the role may be connected with crime, observing that, ‘the papers had been full lately of the exploits of various girl bandits’. In London and the surrounding towns, the gang of women bandits known as the ‘Forty Elephants’ were active at this time. Operating between the 1870s and 1950s, the group were involved in shoplifting and blackmail, as well as using false references to get placements as housemaids, only to go on to steal from their employers’ homes (a ruse that also features in a number of Christie’s books). As in this story, they used fast cars to outrun the police, and, if they were caught, they were often found not to have any goods on them, having cleverly spirited them away with other members of the gang, or via empty suitcases planted at railway stations to stash the goods in. Stolen goods were then disposed of through a chain of ‘fences’ (a term also used in ‘A Fruitful Sunday’ when the couple consider selling on the rubies they have found).[2] The bandit in ‘Jane in Search of a Job’ is American and may also have drawn inspiration from the so-called ‘Bobbed-Hair Bandit’, Celia Cooney (1904–1992), who, together with her husband, embarked on a three-month armed-robbery spree around Brooklyn in 1924. With her petite frame, bobbed hair and baby automatic, 20-year-old Cooney captured the imagination of the press.

She became such a big sensation in the papers because she was a woman with a gun driving a fast car, and that was exciting.[3]

From one gang to another and to ‘Mr Eastwood’s Adventure’ (first published as ‘The Mystery of the Second Cucumber’ in The Novel Magazine, 1924), which sees Anthony Eastwood distracted from his writers’ block by a call from an unknown damsel in distress. Here the damsel is actually part of the notorious ‘Patterson gang’, known for undertaking elaborate schemes to decoy and rob their victims. Yet while Anthony is left denuded of his treasured trinkets, he is furnished with the story that he needs to deliver.   

In a change of pace again, ‘Accident’ (first published as ‘The Uncrossed Path’ in the Sunday Dispatch, September 1929), has some intangible feeling of My Cousin Rachel (1951) by Daphne Du Maurier (1907–1989) about it to me. Maybe it is the description of Mrs Merrowdene: ‘She had the look of an Italian Madonna, which she heightened by parting her hair in the middle’, which is how I’ve always pictured Rachel, with her ‘small hands’ and brown hair ‘parted in the centre with a low knot behind’.[4] Perhaps it is the ambiguity over the poisoning of her first husband, or just the idea of an enigmatic and powerful woman who so compels a man to act against her. More than anything, I think it is the chilling atmosphere conjured by the story, and the shiver at the ‘depths of wickedness’ to which some characters can go. Writing about My Cousin Rachel, Du Maurier observed:

I think myself that it is more fun to write about evil people than good, and I was always in two minds about Rachel anyway – I so thought myself into the part of young Philip and his naïve ways, that I kept wondering as much as he did![5]

Christie and Du Maurier admired each other’s work and wrote to one another about their books, though sadly the women never met.[6]

This story also mentions the practice of arsenic eating, whereby individuals would take arsenic in incrementally larger doses for medicinal purposes. Based on research into small populations in Styria, Austria, it was thought that taking arsenic in this way improved the complexion and reduced signs of ageing. In the nineteenth-century article, ‘The Arsenic Eaters of Styria’, the author proclaimed: ‘As a rule, arsenic eaters are very long lived, and are peculiarly exempt from infectious diseases, fevers, &c.’ [7] Sadly, longevity was not the result for Mr Anthony in ‘Accident’.

Finally, to ‘Swan Song’ (first published in The Grand Magazine, 1926). This story wouldn’t feel out of place in The Mysterious Mr Quin. We close, where we opened, with love (and hate), culminating in sweet revenge and, because this is Agatha Christie after all, murder.

[1] ‘Henri Desire Landru (‘The French Bluebeard’), Found Guilty of Eleven Murders on 1 December 1921, The British Newspaper Archive, 29 November 2013, https://blog.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/2013/11/29/henri-desire-landru-the-french-bluebeard-found-guilty-of-eleven-murders-on-1-december-1921/ [accessed 5 October 2026].

[2] Amelia Hill, ‘Girl Gang’s Grip on London Underworld Revealed’, Guardian, 27 December 2010.

[3] Lauren Young, ‘How We Forgot the Bobbed Haired Bandit’, Atlas Obscura, 26 January 2017, https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/bobbed-hair-bandit [accessed 4 June 2026].

[4] Daphne Du Maurier, My Cousin Rachel (London, 1952), p. 74.

[5] Kerra Maddern, ‘Fascinating Links Between World’s Most Beloved Writers on Display Across Exeter’, Exeter University, 14 August 2023, https://news.exeter.ac.uk/faculty-of-humanities-arts-and-social-sciences/fascinating-links-between-worlds-most-beloved-writers-on-display-across-exeter/ [accessed 4 June 2026].

[6] Maddern 2023.

[7] Charles Heisch, ‘The Arsenic Eaters of Styria’, Boston Medical and Surgical Journal 62, 24 (July 1860), pp. 484–8, DOI: 10.1056/NEJM186007120622404.