Communing with Mr. Quin: The Harlequin Tea Set by Agatha Christie

All About Agatha Christie

Catherine Brobeck & Kemper Donovan

Tv & Film, Books, Film Reviews, Arts

4.7 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 5 November 2022

⏱️ 47 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

What a joy it was to spend some time again with Christie's most dynamic detective duo, Quin & Satterthwaite (sorry, Beresfords). This is the rare late-career Christie short story, and while the puzzle isn't one of her strongest, there's no denying the strange magic of the Satterthwerse....

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to all about Agatha, the podcast dedicated to reading and ranking.
0:09.6	Every single mystery novel written by the Queen of Crime, Dame Agatha Christie, I and
0:14.4	Kemper Donovan, and on this episode I will be covering the Harlequin T-Set, our final
0:22.4	Queen Satterthweight short story. These stories are so beloved on this podcast. Catherine and I had
0:30.4	such a great time covering the mysterious Mr. Quinn collection some time ago, as well as the
0:36.4	love detectives, which was the odd short story Christie wrote around the same time she was writing
0:42.5	all of the other Queen Satterthweight stories that were collected in the mysterious Mr. Quinn.
0:46.7	So we covered all of those, and this story is the true outlier here. But before I get into all of that,
0:54.0	I do just have to note something strange here about where this episode falls in the podcast.
1:00.4	I did not do this on purpose. I really promise. But this story is shockingly similar to the short
1:07.4	story I just covered on my surprise spooktacular episode that would be SOS from The Hound of Death
1:15.6	Collection. And we know that Christie did this a lot. She recycled plots or plot devices or more
1:20.0	accurately puzzle devices, employing the same tricks among different characters and situations,
1:26.4	and it's really shockingly easy to miss these similarities between Christie stories,
1:31.5	unless you have the likes of a Tony Metawer to say you straight, for instance.
1:36.1	Christie once even had her fictional alter ego, Ariadne Oliver, call out this writerly trick. Mrs.
1:42.2	Oliver talked about how some of her mysteries are fundamentally the same. And I believe it was
1:46.8	Poirot himself who pointed that out to her since he is not only a clever detective, but a clever reader.
1:53.1	But of course, and that just means Christie was well aware of what she was doing. And I've talked
1:58.3	ad nauseam on this podcast about how I've come to appreciate this masterful recycling as a core
2:05.1	aspect of her genius. Unfortunately, we do not have masterful recycling here. The issue is that the
2:11.2	puzzle in SOS was fairly thin, along with an awkward stuck in its time element. And I'm sorry to
	...

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