Today’s Countdown to Hallowe’en review from Randy is a supernatural collection from someone better known around the world for her mystery stories.
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Canon Parfitt panted a little. Running for trains was not much of a business for a man of his age. For one thing his figure was not what it was and with the loss of his slender silhouette went an increasing tendency to be short of breath. This tendency the Canon himself always referred to, with dignity, as “My heart, you know!”
— from “The Fourth Man”
In spite of the subtitle, as you read through The Last Séance you’ll often be reminded that Agatha Christie came to fame and rode that fame for over fifty years as a writer of mysteries. And not just any mysteries, but the forerunners of what are now “cozies” in which heinous acts, usually murder, upset the status quo and some intrepid person (say, Hercule Poirot or Mrs. Marple, both represented in this collection) investigates and arrives at a conclusion that identifies the guilty and reestablishes the status quo. But always and contradictory to the often conversational, light-hearted, even blithe narrative voice – of which the above quote is an example – underneath Christie’s stories has been a stratum of darkness well-suited to tales of the supernatural.
This collection includes some gems: The narrator of “The Strange Case of Sir Arthur Carmichael”, Dr. Edward Carstairs, seems descended from Algernon Blackwood’s John Silence or William Hope Hodgson’s Carnacki, but I’m unaware of other stories in which he appears; note that, as with much writing from early in the twentieth century, this story has some less than PC racial description. “The Wife of the Kenite” might have been welcome in Weird Tales and maybe even as basis for an EC comic book as vengeance stalks a man who was just doing his job; given some of the story’s details, that it was first published in 1922 and not post-WWII is a surprise. I’m also surprised “The Dressmaker’s Doll” hasn’t been more widely anthologized; when a doll suddenly appears and makes its home in a dressmaker’s establishment, a growing sense of unease permeates the shop. An augury of death disturbs a woman, awakening her to an imminent threat in “Philomel Cottage”, and “The Fourth Man” contains a story of a kind of possession as told to passengers in a club car.
Like those works of her predecessor, Mrs. Radcliffe, some of these twenty stories are rationalized, the supernatural a façade behind which human darkness lurks: “The Adventure of the Egyptian Tomb” is a fun send up, with Poirot, of the then still current discovery and excavation of King Tut’s tomb and the supposed curse on anyone who opened the tomb. And the clever “The Blue Gardenia” features Mrs. Marple and her practical insight into human nature gleaned from observation of friends and neighbors in St. Mary’s Mead. A few other such stories populate the collection but the lack of ghosts and similar entities is made up for by Christie’s invention and knack for holding the pay off until the very end. As in any collection this size some stories will not work for a given reader. For me, that was “The Call of Wings”, which feels like an attempt at allegory that goes flat. But that was the only story I disliked, and even those that left little impression were entertaining in the moment of reading.
If you want in-depth characterization and social commentary, Christie’s fiction may not be for you. Her stories, as with those of most writers from the “Golden Age” of mysteries, are set in a world in which justice prevails in a society in which everyone knows their place and most are content or at least resigned to their lot. So, really, the supernatural isn’t the only fantasy in these tales. But if you want a break from this world and a chance to bask in a sense of decency ruling the behavior of the majority of both rich and poor, of the law equating to justice and justice triumphant, you’re always welcome to enter the world of Dame Agatha Christie.
THE LAST SÉANCE: TALES OF THE SUPERNATURAL by Agatha Christie William Morrow, 2019
368 pages
ISBN: 978-0008336738
Review by Randy Money
