Book Club

Short Stories

Agatha Christie wrote nearly 160 short stories. This includes the recently discovered and published The Capture of Cerberus and The Incident of the Dog's Ball.   She used many of the plots in later novels and plays. Here you can discuss each one.

We're pretty sure they're all here but if you notice any ommissions just let us know!

Warning: These discussions may contain spoilers!

Yellow Iris

Jemma 07 Sep 09 at 10:06 a.m. GMT

Yellow Iris was first published in 1937 and was later expanded by Christie into the novel, Sparkling Cyanide. She chose, as she often did, to revisit the story and changed the ending (and the culprit).

This is not the only change. Yellow Iris includes the detective Hercule Poirot but Christie chose to remove Poirot when expanding the story into a novel. Which do you prefer? Would the novel have been better had she not made these two changes?

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1 reply

Reverse order

Frndorfoe 17 Sep 09 at 3:37 p.m. GMT

Sparkling Cyanide (novel) is much better than Yellow Iris (short story). Changing the culprit was good but the removal of Poirot was better. That story just didn't need him! Just like I prefer The Hollow as a play rather than as a novel, I prefer Sparkling Cyanide to Yellow Iris. Like AC said that having Hercule in almost everything she wrote had become such a habit with her that she put him in to most of the things she wrote without even thinking about it!