The Labours of Hercules - Agatha Christie

Crime writing has always struck me as little more than writing by numbers. The essential frame is laid out and the author has to do little more than stitch a couple of his or her own colours in to make up their own pattern within the confines of the crime tapestry.

As such, it seems to lack any of the scope that makes fiction the magnificent roaming beast that it is, prying into the depths of consciousness, seeking meaning and beauty in real life’s manifold incomprehensibilities.

I once picked up Louise Welsh’s ‘The Cutting Room’ on the back of a wealth of critical acclaim along the lines of ‘this is crime fiction for lovers of literature’, but found it little more than hackneyed and tiresome.

And the same can be said of Christie’s ‘Labours of Hercules’. This time, I picked it up having found it for 50 cents in a small shop in Lisbon. I had run out of English books and Christie drew me in with its classic Penguin cover.

This particular Christie book consists of 12 short stories in which her hero, Hercule Poirot, decides to undertake 12 more cases before he retires. However, each of the 12 must resemble one of the labours of his mythological namesake, Hercules.

A fairly literary idea for a crime novel, and thus I was drawn in a little further.

After rollocking through the first 70 pages, fighting off horrific visions of my future self as a Christie obsessive, I soon hit the albatross of tediousness that formulaic crime fiction inevitably carries around its neck.

Plod plod plod for 25 pages until each little story is wrapped up successfully by Poirot, usually with a twist or two in the tail.

I can’t fault Christie’s construction. It’s tight, decently written, and moves along pacily enough. But there’s just no flesh to go on the bones.

We have a story, but there is very little depth of character, very little descriptive prose, very little of anything other than an author walking us through the pleasant fictional equation of crimes and their solutions.

Like a picture puzzle we slid the pieces into place and are supposed to feel content with the restoration of order that is the outcome.

Like a picture puzzle, we toss it away afterwards and give it little further thought.