In which that eccentric detective novelist Mrs Oliver is called in to organise a Murder Hunt at a village fete but she suspects all is not as it should be and so asks Hercule Poirot to make sense of her suspicions. All seems well at first until an unexpected murder takes place in the boathouse! Even though the victim provides Poirot a huge clue at first hand before their death, Poirot can’t see the wood for trees until the final few chapters, when all is explained. As usual, if you haven’t read the book yet, don’t worry, I promise not to reveal whodunit!

And if that sounds like the plot to Dead Man’s Folly, that’s because it is! Hercule Poirot and the Greenshore Folly was originally written to pay for a church window in the chancel of St Mary the Virgin in Churston Ferrers, the church where Christie worshipped. However, as John Curran explains in his excellent notes that accompany the book, Christie’s agents found it impossible to sell the manuscript! That was because it was neither short story nor novel, and didn’t fit into the market at the time. Undeterred, Christie wrote a new short story for the church window, the similarly named but completely different Greenshaw’s Folly, that was published in the UK in the collection The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding.

Writing Hercule Poirot and the Greenshore Folly was not wasted however, as Christie realised she could expand it into a full length novel, and that’s how Dead Man’s Folly was born. This “junior version” of the later novel wasn’t published in the UK until 2014, by Harper Collins, and with an introduction by the man with whom everyone associates Christie paperback covers, the artist Tom Adams, who died in 2019.

If you have already read Dead Man’s Folly, then there is no reason (other than the purely academic exercise of comparing the two texts) to read Greenshore Folly. They tell precisely the same tale, with precisely the same clues, twists and surprises, and with precisely the same murderer. If you haven’t read either, jump straight to Dead Man’s Folly and don’t bother with the earlier version. Not that there’s anything wrong with it, it’s just the whole description of the detective investigation is much more sparse and less involving. If, in the unlikely event that you’ve read Greenshore Folly but not Dead Man’s Folly, wait a few years until you’ve completely forgotten the plot and the characters, and then read Dead Man’s Folly; it will come as a pleasant surprise.

Apart from a few extended conversations and some name/place name changes, both books are virtually identical up until the first murder. At that point, Dead Man’s Folly goes into much more rewarding detail about the detective procedure, whereas Greenshore Folly performs a short-cut and more or less jumps to the end.

Thematically, then, the book is on exactly the same lines as Dead Man’s Folly – so if you want to read more, please refer to my blog about it! The link is above. Like the fuller version, I think this deserves a 7/10.

We’re so very near the end of the Agatha Christie Challenge, gentle reader! All that remains is to consider five more short stories that have come to light in recent years. Four of them were printed in John Curran’s two excellent books; The Capture of Cerberus and The Incident of the Dog’s Ball in Agatha Christie’s Secret Notebooks, and Miss Marple and the Case of the Caretaker’s Wife and The Man Who Knew in Agatha Christie – Murder in the Making. Additionally, The Wife of the Kenite has been published in the collection Bodies from the Library, edited by Tony Medawar.

I’ll give them all a read shortly, and, as usual, I’ll blog my thoughts about them soon. In the meantime, please read them too then we can compare notes! Happy sleuthing!