“The Market Basing Mystery” In this Poirot story, Poirot, Hastings and Japp go to Market Basing, a town they thought they would have some nice downtime — but they were wrong, because there’s a murder! A man has supposedly died by suicide but a housekeeper says that it’s not possible. And sure enough, after Poirot investigates he finds that to be the case. Everyone was going to pin it on the guests that were staying with the man, and they were involved but they didn’t kill him. Turns out this guy had a shady past and his guests were blackmailing him for hush money, forcing the man to end his life, but the housekeeper was so fond of him that she was pissed at the guests for blackmailing them and tampered with the scene to make it look like they killed him. Score point for Poirot! // “The Case of the Missing Lady” This was a funny one! Tommy and Tuppence get a visitor from a man who requires their services because this woman he was engaged to appears to be missing. He went to go see her and the housekeeper wouldn’t really tell her where she was. So T&T get some leads that leads to this strange house and they find the girl looking sickly and getting injections. But when they talk to her they find out she’s just trying to lose weight because apparently her betrothed hates fat women and she wants to lose weight. Setting aside the fact that that both of them sound like wonderful people, especially the guy (sarcasm), the story was funny in the fact that T&T were annoying they wasted their time thinking the woman was in trouble and vow to leave the investigation of that case out of their records. // “The Herb of Death” This is a Miss Marple story where she is at a dinner party and someone is sharing a story about a previous dinner party where everyone got food poisoning from foxglove mixed among the sage leaves but one girl died. It wasn’t an accident; who at the party killed her? Everyone talks about motives of various people but Miss Marple determines that the girl was poisoned by the host, and older guy (ew) who was in love with her and didn’t want her married. He was on heart meds and the medication was the same as what everyone was poisoned by. Mystery solved by Marple. // “How does your garden grow?” In this Hercule Poirot story, he receives a letter from a woman asking him to contact her. But he realizes when she doesn’t reply that she has died. She has left money to a Russian girl who helped her. The dead woman’s niece tells Poirot he does not need to come over and see what the issue was; this is because she killed the woman for the money, only to realize the money went to the girl. (Classic case of killing someone for the money.) But the way Poirot discovers it is the unique part of the story: a row of unsymmetrical shells in an otherwise very nice garden. They are oyster shells the niece used to poison the woman. I like how this story made use of the nursery rhymes, “Mary Mary quite contrary, How does your garden grow? With silver bells and cockle shells (oyster shells!) and pretty maids all in a row.” // “Swan Song” In this story, an opera singer, Paula Nazorkoff, is performing in London. She recognizes some names of who will be watching the performance but we don’t know who they are until the end. The man who is slated to sing that night falls ill so another man takes his place. He shares stories of a girl in his past who begged him to save her lover but he let him die because he felt it was not worth it (who brags about something like that???). During the play this man is stabbed by Paula and she actually kills him even though it was supposed to be fake. Turns out she was that girl and this was her revenge. // “Miss Marple Tells a Story” In this story, Miss Marple is approached to share what she thinks of a murder where a woman was found stabbed in her bed. Her husband was in the room next to her and saw no one go in or out except for a chambermaid. Miss Marple deduces that because this maid was a middle aged woman no one paid much attention to her so they didn’t look at her face — only how she was dressed. The maid was actually a second woman, who had come there to take revenge on the daughter who died when this woman accidentally hit her with her car. A clever plan to pass by unnoticed was foiled by Miss Marple! // “Have You Got Everything You Want?”Haha, this was funny. Parker Pyne, a guy who helps people with their happiness meets a woman on a train who tells him he found a weird note in her husband’s handwriting about something happening on the train. Sure enough, there’s a smoke bomb and the woman’s jewels go missing. Parker Pyne finds out that the woman’s husband orchestrated the theft because he was being blackmailed by a woman who claimed he was having an affair before he was married. And the husband thought his wife would leave him. But Parker Pyne tells him to tell his wife the affair was real but then he met her and his life forever changed. PP thinks that wives want to know they’ve made an impact; not that their man is soft. Lol // “The Jewel Robbery at the Grand Metropolitan” In this story a woman’s pearls are stolen and Poirot is on the case. He finds a white powder that the thieves used to quietly open and close a drawer while a maid passed through within seconds. Then Poirot got their fingerprints on a card. The chambermaid and valet of the victims were actually longtime jewel thieves. // “Ingots of Gold” In this Miss Marple story, Raymond tells a story about a time he went to a friend’s place who knew a lot about shipwrecks. The friend, Newman, is kidnapped and found tied up in a ditch one night and tells Raymond that he witnessed smugglers of a shipwreck stealing something and they did this to him. But Miss Marple discovers that this Newman is actually an infamous thief of gold and he’s now in a prison. He used the smuggling story to cover his tracks. // “The Soul of the Croupier” This is a Mr. Quin story, a character who appears in some of Agatha Christie’s short stories. We follow Mr. Satterthwaite in Monte Carlo. There is a Countess who seems to be trying to get between a young American man and girl. The countess doesn’t appear to be all she seems — during own gambling session Mr. Satterthwaite wins but the croupier (I guess that’s a dealer) pushes his winnings to the Countess, who keeps losing. he keeps quiet about this (dude why???). He goes to a party that Mr. Quin has organized and Quin has invited the croupier as well, who tells the story about a woman he fell in love with but who just stole all his jewels and left him — turns out that woman was the countess. And she burns the money he gave her, revealing her true nature and allowing the two Americans to come back to each other. I’ll admit I didn’t really get this story… I didn’t understand the meaning behind it I guess. // “The Girl in the Train” In this story, a young man named George is running away from home because his uncle doesn’t like his lifestyle (lol) and is on a train when a beautiful girl asked to hide in his car. He complies and gets her uncle sent away. The girl, Elizabeth, asks him to shadow a man for her and George will do anything for her so he does. This man turns out to be a spy but we learn that George has learned jujutsu so it’s all good (lol again). He runs into a detective form Scotland Yard who tells him about the spy and George wonders how that could connect to Elizabeth but when he sees her on the train again he finds out that she was actually helping a friend on a different mission by pretending to be royalty so her royal friend could marry the man she likes, and that she just send George on basically an non-related goose chase. But George still likes her so he proposed to her. It feels like Christie meant for this whole story to be comical and I love that. // “Greenshaw’s Folly” This is a Miss Marple short story where her nephew Raymond visits this house called Greenshaw’s Folly, and the woman who owns it dies after making a will to give everything to her housekeeper rather than her nephew. In the house it’s only the housekeeper and the gardener. Miss Greenshaw is witnessed as being killed with an arrow through the throat by a girl named Louisa, who was recently hired there and had only been there for two days. When Louisa tries to help she finds herself locked in her room, and the housekeeper is too. But Miss Marple deduced that the housekeeper was the murderer; having killed Greenshaw earlier and then pretended to be out gardening and shot with an arrow. Louisa hadn’t seen the true Greenshaw. But the Gardner, who ends up being the recipient of the will, is actually a distant relative who inherits the house, and the housekeeper killed Miss Greenshaw for nothing.