This is a collection Miss Marple and Poirot stories repackaged and republished in 1961. There’s about a split in terms of how many of each you get. What’s great about the audiobook version is that a lot of the files are clearly pulled and recollected from other produced audiobooks, so you get a variety of different actors reading them. I think this or something similar to this would be a really interesting usage of this kind of material to see who does different things with the two detectives. It’s not unlike comparing different actors’ versions in the films and television shows. Here you get David Suchet reading a story, alongside Joan Hickson. There’s also a story read by Simon Vance, who I like, but he can’t make his Poirot not sound exactly like his Lestat, which adds a funny bit of accidental crossover in my mind.
For the most parts the stories are good. It’s odd to me, as with other detectives (not Holmes for the obvious point that most Holmes stories are stories and not novels) how one dials down down detectives knows for their novels into singular stories. It’s not that different from reading the Ian Fleming Bond stories this weekend and thinking the same question. In some case there’s simply a moving the stories into a more interior space. In others, the stories just have fewer components. There’s not one specific way to make it work.
One thing that I often get into with people is how different Poirot’s mustache is in people’s minds versus various film versions. Yes, Kenneth Branagh’s is silly, but it’s also exactly as it’s described in the novel. Here there’s a story that hinges on a mustache and Poirot can’t help but feel superior for having the greater mustache.
(Photo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Sin_and_Other_Stories)
