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Masterpieces of Mystery and the Unknown is the 1969 short-story collection that gathers Agatha Christie's supernatural and uncanny shorts across six decades, organized away from her Poirot and Marple work. The collection includes The Last Seance, In a Glass Darkly, The Mystery of the Blue Jar, and a handful of other pieces that almost never get anthologized alongside the formal detective stories.
Christie's supernatural mode is the underread half of her short-fiction career. The pieces in this collection draw on Edwardian ghost-story conventions (M. R. James, Mary Wilkins Freeman) and the Spiritualist movement Christie engaged with throughout her life. Some stories are competent rather than great; The Last Seance and The Mystery of the Blue Jar are the standouts and earn their inclusion in any best-of conversation.
Recommended for Christie completists, for fans of Edwardian-tradition ghost stories (Algernon Blackwood, Mary Roberts Rinehart), and for readers looking for books like Masterpieces of Mystery and the Unknown in the early-20th-century uncanny-fiction tradition. Four stars and one of the better non-Poirot Christie volumes.
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Spider's Web
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