Mystery of the Blue Train
The Côte d’Azur, today a mere hour-and-a-half’s flying time from London, was formerly a winter and early spring escape for the well-to-do, whose favoured mode of travel was the famous Blur Train, via Dover and Calais, to Nice. It was in those days more like twenty-four hours before its moneyed occupants were able to settle down in the kinder Mediterranean climate.
In this Agatha Christie classic, the journey is of special significance for one passenger, more moneyed than the rest; for the others aboard the Blue Train, the minor thrill of arrival is over-shadowed by the discovery that murder has been committed en route.
Listerdale mystery
Why should anyone be willing to let a beautiful, and beautifully furnished, London House (cost of butler and servants included) to an unknown gentlewoman of almost no means for a nominal fifty shillings per week? And what had really happened to the vanished peer of the realm who had lived there? This is just one of the mysteries in this collection of twelve of Agatha Christie’s shorter stories: each in its own way a collector’s item.
Murder at the vicarage
In the course of their duties vicars have to meet and come to know all kinds of people. Some of them generous, others niggardly; some of them saintly, others sinister. Discretion and evident tolerance come to be part of the churchman’s essential aura. To have declared that the murder of one particular parishioner would be of benefit to the world at large was a very unclerical indiscretion - especially so since the parishioner in question was found shot dead in the vicar’s own study only a few hours later.
