The Complete Quin & Satterthwaite: Love Detectives
53. The Complete Quin & Satterthwaite: Love Detectives by Agatha Christie (Mystery, Short Story Collection) 552 p. (280 p.)
The Complete Quin & Satterthwaite collects all of Christie’s short stories featuring Mr. Satterthwaite and Mr. Harley Quin. It also includes a novel, Three-Act Tragedy, and a novella, Dead Man’s Mirror, which are Hercule Poirot stories featuring Mr. Sattertwaite in a cameo role. I didn’t actually re-read those, since it hasn’t been long since I last read them, and since they don’t include Mr. Quin, and so don’t really fit the atmosphere of the short stories.
The book opens with The Mysterious Mr. Quin, a collection originally published in 1930, which first introduced the characters of Quin and Satterthwaite, and includes 12 short stories. All the stories are told from the perspective of Mr. Satterthwaite, a kind, elderly gentleman, well-off, a bachelor, slightly snobbish, a connoisseur of art and music, and a man who enjoys his comforts. Christie often describes him as the playgoer type—a man sensitive to impressions, interested in the drama of life.
In The Coming of Mr. Quin, Mr. Satterthwaite is the guest at a New Year’s Eve house party when the subject of Derek Capel’s suicide is raised. Some years earlier, the house belonged to a friend of the current owners, who shot himself, though no one was ever able to discover the reason why. Suddenly, not long after midnight, there are three loud knocks at the door, and the host goes rises to open it.
Framed in the doorway stood a man’s figure, tall and slender. To Mr. Satterthwaite, watching, he appeared by some curious effect of the stained glass above the door, to be dressed in every colour of the rainbow. Then, as he stepped forward, he showed himself to be a thin dark man dressed in motoring clothes.
Mr. Quin’s car, it seems, has broken down, and he’s come to the house hoping to stay warm while his chauffeur fixes it. It soon emerges that Mr. Quin was also a friend of Capel’s, and the party continues to wonder about his suicide. Mr. Quin has a strange idea that mysteries may actually be easier to solve some time after the fact, because events begin to appear in their true perspective only after the passage of time. As he comments, “the contemporary historian never writes such a true history as the historian of a later generation.”
As they continue to discuss the problem, new interpretations of the old facts begin to emerge. It isn’t long before Mr. Quin and Mr. Satterthwaite are able to put together a true picture of the death of Derek Capel, not only finding the truth, but uniting a pair of unhappy lovers, as well.
The other eleven stories follow much the same lines. Although the stories don’t always take place long after the crime has been committed, the solution always hinges on a re-examination of the evidence putting the facts into their proper perspective.
In The Shadow on the Glass, the shooting of two young people seems to be connected to the ghostly figure of a Cavalier, known to appear in the glass of an upstairs window. When Mr. Quin turns up unexpectedly, his presence prompts Mr. Satterthwaite to solve the case. At the ‘Bells and Motley’ is the story of a chance encounter between Quin and Satterthwaite at a country inn, where half an hour’s conversation reveals the solution to an old mystery. It’s followed by The Sign in the Sky, in which Mr. Satterthwaite manages to prove the innocence of a man condemned to death by the evidence of a mysterious sign seen by a servant.
The Soul of the Croupier is an odd story, one which contains no crime at all, only the union of lovers which is a theme throughout all the stories. In it, a young American man becomes ensnared by an ageing but beautiful adventuress, who has a past known only to one man. The able stage-management of Mr. Quin leads to a satisfactory resolution.
Similarly, The Man from the Sea does not deal with solving crime, but with preventing tragedy and uniting lovers. When Mr. Satterthwaite, on vacation on a Spanish island, meets a suicidal man on the edge of a cliff, he listens to the man’s story. Not long after, he finds himself listening to another story, one with unexpected points of similarity, and finds a way to make things right for both his new acquaintances—with, of course, the invaluable, behind-the-scenes assistance of the mysterious Mr. Quin.
Mr. Satterthwaite got up, trembling a little.
“I must get back to the hotel,” he said. “If you are going that way.”
But Mr. Quin shook his head.
“No,” he said. “I shall go back the way I came.”
When Mr. Satterthwaite looked back over his shoulder, he saw his friend walking towards the edge of the cliff.
In The Voice in the Dark, a conversation with Mr. Quin stimulates Mr. Satterthwaite’s memory, giving him the solution to an old deception and a new murder. An unexpected encounter with Mr. Quin at the opera in The Face of Helen leads Mr. Satterthwaite to an acquaintance with a pleasant, ordinary young woman whose beautiful face sparks tragedy wherever she goes, and the opportunity to prevent a murder.
One of my favourite stories in the collection is The Dead Harlequin. At the showing of some watercolours by a new artist, Mr. Satterthwaite buys a painting that sparks his imagination: a dead Harlequin lies on a black-and-white-tiled floor, while the same Harlequin looks in at the window. The setting is a place he knows, the terrace room at a country house called Charnley. He also feels that he recognizes the face of the Harlequin, an old friend of his. Impressed with the artist’s work, Mr. Satterthwaite invites the young man to dinner with himself and a friend. He half-expects Mr. Quin to show up that evening, and he does—as do two other unexpected guests, leading to the solution of a fourteen-year-old murder.
The Bird with the Broken Wing is a rather melancholy, creepy tale of the suicide, or possibly murder, of a young woman. Not beautiful, but with an air of tragedy, she intrigues Mr. Satterthwaite because she has got a quality of enchantment he’s rarely seen. When her body is found hanging on the back of her bedroom door, Satterthwaite is sure that a murder has been committed.
When Mr. Satterthwaite travels to Corsica with a Duchess in The World’s End, a chance encounter on a day-trip to a tiny mountain village leads to the vindication of a man accused of theft, and the restoration of joy to a very unhappy young woman. Of course, none of this would be possible without Mr. Quin, the man who comes unexpectedly, and leaves as suddenly as he arrives.
The last story in The Mysterious Mr. Quin is Harlequin’s Lane, my favourite. When the two professional dancers hired to perform in a village harlequinade are injured in a car accident, a former dancer takes the place of Columbine, while Mr. Quin, naturally, dances the part of Harlequin. The brief description of the dance and of the story of Harlequin, Columbine, Pierrot, and Pierette was something I loved as a child. This story, more than any of the others, embodies the magic that makes the Quin and Satterthwaite stories so special.
As I said, I skipped Three-Act Tragedy and Dead Man’s Mirror, which aren’t actually Quin and Satterthwaite stories at all. The collection ends with two short stories published in other collections: The Love Detectives and The Harlequin Tea Set.
In The Love Detectives, a minor car accident leads to Mr. Quin’s presence at a murder investigation. With his prompting, Mr. Satterthwaite is able to see through some tricky evidence and solve a murder, saving the life of the person who would probably have been convicted of the crime.
The last story is The Harlequin Tea Set, which makes a perfect end to the book. On the way to visit an old friend, Mr. Satterthwaite meets Mr. Quin in a coffee shop, and later manages to prevent a terrible tragedy. It’s a good mystery, and I really want that tea set for myself!
I was always attracted by the image of Harlequin as a child, a happy trickster dressed in a bright rainbow of colours. I love how Agatha Christie’s stories show the everyday, ordinary, matter-of-fact world of Mr. Satterthwaite alongside the mysterious, magical, unearthly world of Harley Quin. That she never feels the need to solve the mystery, to expose the secret of Mr. Quin, is one of the greatest charms of the stories for me.
It’s that wonderful, supernatural quality of Harley Quin that leads me to count this toward [ouatii], as well as as a bonus read for the [aac].
Pages read: 14,566
Tags: 50 Book Challenge 2008, Agatha Christie, Anything Agatha Challenge, Once Upon a Time II, Quin and Satterthwaite
