For richer or poorer: searching for a story from Agatha Christie

Of the many books that I have read over the years, there was one story that stuck with me. It was from an Agatha Christie book. The story was one of many in that book and for some reason I could not remember what the book title was! To be fair I read it when I was in Uni in the 1990s. 

It was about a rich woman who found life dull and so she consulted an agency who specialised in finding happiness for people who aren’t. The rich woman then found herself in a rather impoverished state after a rather theatrical scenario to make her believe that her persona was transferred to a different person. But after all the challenges that she overcame in her new environment, she somehow found fulfilment in it all. 

It’s a short but beautiful story, one that will no longer hold water in this age of mobile phones, but for some reason it stuck in my mind and I'm actually not sure what caused me to remember and search for it!

So for one reason or another I was determined to find that book again. Thanks to Google search, I found out that the book was titled Parker Pyne Investigates and the title of that story was “The case of the rich woman”.

 

Another online search revealed that I can buy it second hand but was surprisingly pricey. New books more so. But a trip to the op shop gave me an awesome surprise when the very book I was looking was displayed prominently over other books. I gladly paid $2 for it. The quality is not great and the pages have started to yellow, but there were no tears and is very much readable.

 

That was three months ago and I satisfied my craving to read that story again. Along the way to searching for that book I actually bought a couple more Agatha Christie novels from various op shops. These are sitting on our bookshelf, waiting to be read and appreciated.

 

But getting re-acquainted with that story actually rekindled a previous hobby: reading books. I've been reading books for as long as I can remember. I read in third or fourth grade school, often staying in the library when all the other kids are outside playing. In my fifth and sixth grade Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys mystery books were all the rage and it was not just me who were crazy over the books. When the bell rang everybody would rush to the library to borrow. I remember reading an average of three books in a week! Then after a while, the interest waned and its prominent place in the library was replaced by Asterix comic books. I never did get the hang of reading Asterix. But I loved the mystery novels so much that I sought them out even in high school, where I discovered Trixie Belden.

It was in university that I read my first Agatha Christie book. I'm not sure if it was the murder in the library or the popular Christmas themed "Three blind mice" (also called Mousetrap), but since reading that first book and being gobsmacked by the ending I've become an Agatha Christie fan ever since. 

So I guess my remembering that short story from so many years ago doesn't really come as a surprise.

So I have of late been focusing more on books than on plants (which I obsessed over since the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020).

Since our trip to Japan early this year, I have been fascinated with more stuff from the country, including books. I’ve been reading up on Japanese food recipes (and I have cooked some bento boxes too!) and even story books. I might write about those at length, in my next post. So yes, I'm back in my reading era.

I'm actually not sure what to end this blog post with for my choice of song, but this one's book related so might as well!