Агата Кристи

While the Light Lasts


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       Copyright

      Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

       www.harpercollins.co.uk

      First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 1997

      Agatha Christie® While the Light Lasts

      copyright © Agatha Christie Limited 1997. All rights reserved.

      www.agathachristie.com

      Cover by designedbydavid.co.uk © HarperCollins/Agatha Christie Ltd 2008

      Agatha Christie asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

      A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

      This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

      All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

      Source ISBN: 9780008196462

      Ebook Edition © December 2016 ISBN: 9780007422913

      Version: 2017-04-17

      Contents

       Cover

       Title Page

       Christmas Adventure

       The Lonely God

       Manx Gold

       Within a Wall

       The Mystery of the Baghdad Chest

       While the Light Lasts

       Acknowledgements

       Keep Reading …

       Also by Agatha Christie

       About the Publisher

       Preface

      Agatha Christie, the original Queen of Crime, still reigns supreme as the greatest and best known writer of the classical detective story. Her most famous novel, and very possibly the most famous of all detective stories, is The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926) in which she outraged the critics and, by doing so, established herself in the first rank of writers in the genre. That case was solved by Hercule Poirot, late of the Belgian Police Force, who appeared in 33 novels including Murder on the Orient Express (1930), The ABC Murders (1936), Five Little Pigs (1942), After the Funeral (1953), Hallowe’en Party (1969) and Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case (1975). Christie’s own favourite among her detectives was Miss Jane Marple, an elderly spinster who appeared in 12 novels, including The Murder at the Vicarage (1930), The Body in the Library (1942), A Pocket Full of Rye (1953), A Caribbean Mystery (1964) and its sequel Nemesis (1971), and finally in Sleeping Murder (1976), which like Curtain had been written during the Blitz nearly 30 years earlier. And among the 21 novels that do not feature any of Christie’s series detectives are And Then There Were None (1939), in which there is no detective at all, Crooked House (1949), Ordeal by Innocence (1959), and Endless Night (1967).

      In a career that lasted more than half a century, Christie wrote 66 novels, an autobiography, six ‘Mary Westmacott’ books, a memoir of her expedition to Syria, two books of poetry, another of poems and children’s stories, more than 20 stage and radio mysteries and around 150 short stories. This new collection brings together nine stories that, with a couple of exceptions, have not previously been reissued since their original publication (in some cases, 60 to 70 years ago). Poirot appears in two stories, ‘The Mystery of the Baghdad Chest’ and ‘Christmas Adventure’. These are Christie’s original versions of two novellas included in the collection The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding (1960). ‘The Edge’ is a tense psychological story and ‘The Actress’ involves a clever deception. The enigmatic ‘Within a Wall’ and ‘The Lonely God’ are romantic stories, dating from the earliest years of Christie’s career; and there is a spice of the supernatural in ‘The House of Dreams’ and ‘While the Light Lasts’. Finally, there is ‘Manx Gold’, a story whose form and concept was unique in its time but which has since become very popular all over the world.

      Nine stories that all display the inimitable style of Agatha Christie. A true banquet for connoisseurs!

      Tony Medawar

       London

       December 1996

       The House of Dreams

      This is the story of John Segrave—of his life, which was unsatisfactory; of his love, which was unsatisfied; of his dreams, and of his death; and if in the two latter he found what was denied in the two former, then his life may, after all, be taken as a success. Who knows?

      John Segrave came of a family which had been slowly going downhill for the last century. They had been landowners since the days of Elizabeth, but their last piece of property was sold. It was thought well that one of the sons at