The murder of Roget’s Thesaurus: Gene finds an old Agatha Christie tome

WASHINGTON, DC : When I was a teenager, I loved murder mysteries from the 1920s, ‘30s and ‘40s, particularly those by Agatha Christie. Until recently, I thought I had read everything Dame Agatha had ever written featuring her idiosyncratic Belgian detective Hercule Poirot. So I was surprised and delighted to discover in a bookstore a collection of Poirot short stories I had not seen before. Most of them were from very early in Christie’s career, published only in magazines.

I bought the book and settled in for a trip down Memory Lane. Alas, it turned into a trip down the descending colon. These stories stank. Christie had yet to figure out exactly who Poirot would be. Instead of having a charmingly ordered mind, he was an annoying fussbudget. Instead of being a likable aesthete, he was comically effeminate. Instead of being a little full of himself, he was an insufferable egomaniac. The plots were derivative: Poirot and his loyal sidekick, Hastings, did not so much resemble Holmes and Watson as duplicate them to a potentially litigable degree.