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I’ve meaning to take part in First Line Friday (hosted by Carrie @ Reading is My SuperPower)  for ages. I’m listening to Parker Pyne Investigates read by Hugh Fraser, via the BookBeat app. It’s a favourite Agatha Christie short story collection that definitely deserves more recognition.

The first few lines for the first short story ‘The Case of the Middle-Aged Wife’ is: 

“Four Grunts, an indignant voice asking why nobody could leave a hat alone, a slammed door, and Mr Packington had departed to catch the eight forty-five to the city. Mrs Packington sat on at the breakfast table. Her face was flushed, her lips pursed,and the only reason she was not crying was that the last minute anger had take the place of grief. “I won’t stand it,” said Mrs Packington. “I won’t stand it!”

About The Book

Parker Pyne Investigates by Agatha Christie“A collection of short stories featuring the redoubtable ‘heart specialist’, Parker Pyne. This volume, in its contemporary Agatha Christie Collection livery, perfectly illustrates Agatha Christie’s critically–acclaimed foray into light-hearted, romantic mysteries.

Mrs Packington felt alone, helpless and utterly forlorn. But her life changed when she stumbled upon an advertisement in The Times which read: ‘ARE YOU HAPPY? IF NOT, CONSULT MR PARKER PYNE’.

Equally adept at putting together the pieces of a marriage or the fragments of a murder mystery, Mr Parker Pyne was possibly the world’s most unconventional private eye – and certainly its most charming.”