The Under Dog and Other Stories

Nine early Hercule Poirot cases gather here, drawn from the magazine fiction Agatha Christie wrote in the years just after the detective's debut. The title novella opens the collection: a wealthy man is found dead in his study, and the Belgian detective is engaged to sift the household for the one person whose guilt the family would rather not name. The shorter pieces range across the kinds of puzzles Poirot solved for the weekly press. In one, a young heiress is found dead in a railway compartment on the Plymouth Express. In another, a man in fancy dress is killed during a Victory Ball, and a strange detail at the scene sets Poirot on the trail. Further entries take in a missing village man, a disputed family inheritance said to carry a curse, a Cornish wife who fears she is being poisoned, a death linked to a game of cards, a set of stolen submarine plans, and the small domestic mystery of a cook who vanishes from a Clapham household. Captain Hastings narrates several of the investigations and serves as Poirot's foil, while the methods stay rooted in observation, interview, and the detective's faith in order and method over physical pursuit. Assembled for American readers in 1951, the volume captures Poirot in his formative period, when Christie was building the character and conventions that would shape her later novels. The tone is brisk and the cases self-contained, each turning on a small inconsistency that only Poirot reads correctly.