In the 1920s, Agatha Christie wrote dozens of supernatural and romance tales, as well as the crime and detective stories on which her reputation still rests. The Mysterious Mr Quin collection, which blurs and blends several genres, proved less popular than her Poirot and Marple short stories, which had a reassuringly codified crime-investigation-solution narrative structure. Yet these tales (plus two extras not included in the original collection) were the author’s personal favourites; uniquely among her works, she dedicated the book to the title character himself, ‘Harlequin the Invisible’.
The collection’s central mystery — which is left unsolved — concerns the nature of the elusive Mr Quin. A stock character from the sixteenth-century Italian commedia dell’arte, Arlecchino (Harlequin) changed over time from a clown figure to more of a romantic hero. In Christie’s stories, he appears as if from nowhere, amid various optical illusions that evoke the harlequin’s traditional costume. He is introduced like this:
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