Short Story Honesty & The Occult: Double Sin + The Golden Ball | 1961 & 1971

(image from here)

(image from here)

"Suddenly the child stirred. His eyes opened. He looked past his mother towards the open door. He tried to speak and she bent down to catch the half-breathed words. 'All right, I'm comin,' he whispered, then sank back. The mother felt suddenly terrified; she crossed the room to her father. Somewhere near them the other child was laughing. Joyful, contented, triumphant, the silvery laughter echoed through the room. 'I'm frightened, I'm frightened,' she moaned.

He put his arm around her protectingly. A sudden gust of wind made them both start, but it passed swiftly and left the air quiet as before.The laughter had ceased and there crept to them a faint sound, so faint as hardly to be heard, but growing louder till they could distinguish it. Footsteps -- light footsteps swiftly departing.

Pitter-patter, pitter-patter, they ran -- those well-known halting little feet. Yet -- surely -- now other footsteps suddenly mingled with them, moving with a quicker and lighter tread."
  - The Golden Ball and Other Stories, p. 166

The Sum of It:
More short stories for the both of us this week! We are kind of reaching our limit of clever-ish things to say about dear Agatha's short stories, so we decided to combine our two book posts this week and offer a little Halloween weekend twist on our latest reads.

But first, a little spotlight on some of the stories we read in Double Sin & Golden Ball. These two collections are both a smattering of all of Agatha's sleuths and styles. We have Poirot and Marple and James Bond (no, not THAT James Bond) and little romantic couples and CREEEPYYYY couples and cat people (yes, CAT PEOPLE) and the list goes on and on! The title story from Double Sin and Other Stories is a fun one. Poor over-worked Poirot (he just CAN'T say no to trivial cases because his little grey cells need stimulation!) agrees to go on a bus holiday with Hastings to get some R&R. Along the way they meet a nice girl named Mary who works in the antiques business with her kind aunt. Mary is on her way to meet up with an American collector who wants to buy a set of "valuable miniatures." When the group stops for lunch, Mary is sure she sees a man trying to steal her suitcase with the miniatures! She runs outside to confront the guy and he's like whoa, settle down, we just have the same suitcase (aka, my airport baggage claim nightmare.) Mary's like whoops, my bad, kind sir! HOWEVER, when they arrive at the hotel later that day, Mary is devastated to find out that her miniatures WERE STOLEN AFTER ALL! Have no fear, Poirot is here! (sayeth Poirot) and the vacationing sleuth gets to work finding his poor friend's treasures.

Double Sin is a rather fun collection if you want to have a bit of Poirot and a bit of Marple in your life. Some other fun stories from the book are Sanctuary (Miss Marple's vicar's wife pal, Bunch, heads into church to do some stuff and stumbles across a man DYING on the church floor. His mysterious last words are "sanctuary!" and something about jewels. Bunch gets in touch with Miss Marple straight away to help discover what happened to the poor man), and The Theft of the Royal Ruby (aka The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding - one of our favorites!)

The Golden Ball and Other Stories is a bit disappointing, to be honest. It's a mix of the not-so-great romantic mystery vignette stories from The Listerdale Mystery (some of them are seriously like, moralistic tales, it's weird) and some straight up #DARK ghost stories from The Hound of Death. We have had a running text conversation about our thoughts and feelings on these short stories and the stretches concerning Golden Ball were almost all Emily giving Audrey the basic creepy plot followed by exclamations of "WHAA?!?!" (Spoilery example: "One with a ghost gypsy who tries to save someone from a terrible fate by marrying him then turns out terrible fate is that he accidentally kills ghost gypsy then he dies too and they both are ghosts!" "WHAT. AGATHA STOP IT.") - essentially, if you're looking for some ghosty reads for Halloween, definitely give this a crack, because it's got all the haunted houses and ghost children your Halloween heart might desire (starting about midway through the book, with The Hound of Death). If you're looking for your typical Agatha short story gems, give this one a pass, and get yourself to Poirot Investigates.

The YOA Treatment:
In her Autobiography, Agatha discusses her mother's dabbling in the occult (in addition to several other religions, including Catholicism and Buddhism #wellrounded). Agatha talks about Mother Clara having a sense about danger and even sensing people's thoughts, and this interest transferred a bit to the daughter, as many of Agatha's early stories and some of her subsequent work followed her interest in spiritualism and paranormal activity.

Many of the tales in The Golden Ball (which was not published in the UK), which were pulled from the alternate collection The Hound of Death, concern the terrible mysteries of the paranormal world. Compared to Agatha's novels, these stories feel totally unusual, intentionally scary, as opposed to a who-dunnit style mystery. If you're in the market for a quick spooky tale to read aloud to your pals over the light of a flickering Jack-o-lantern this weekend, we can recommend The Lamp, or The Hound of Death.

- A. & E.

P.s. Don't forget to sign up for Booktrack and try out a fun way to experience Agatha, for free! Go back to our post from a few days ago to find the link for signup.