Publication History
In 1923, Agatha Christie published a short story titled “The Submarine Plans” in the UK magazine Sketch. This short story was expanded into the 77-page novella The Incredible Theft, a title that alludes to the audacious nature of the crime at the heart of the story. The novella was serialized in the Daily Express, captivating readers with its unfolding plot starting in 1937. “The Incredible Theft” and three other short stories were collected to form the short story collection Murder in the Mews, also published in the UK in 1937.
Synopsis
Lord Mayfield is hosting a sumptuous dinner party at his country house. In attendance are several military intelligence personnel and at least one spy. The atmosphere is thick with suspicion and tension. When the top-secret plans for a new bomber are stolen from a stack of papers off Lord Mayfield’s desk, the guests, their spouses, Lord Mayfield, and the house staff come under intense scrutiny, each one a potential suspect in the web of espionage.
Lord Mayfield, though he has his suspicions, understands the delicate nature of the situation. He calls on the discreet and astute Hercule Poirot to investigate the matter, knowing that only Poirot’s unique skills can prevent an international incident from unfolding.
Hercule Poirot individually examines the motives and psychology of everyone in the house and lays a trap for the thief.
The Review
The Hercule Poirot of The Incredible Theft is more playful and youthful than in other iterations. He admires beautiful young ladies, frolics upstairs, and pretends to be a silly foreigner. His feigned frivolity masks the potent mind silently working underneath.
We get a close-up examination of Poirot’s method for solving his cases. He examines motives, timelines, and the psychology of a suspect one by one and fully eliminates them until there can only be one solution. He then snares the culprit using the facts of the night, which he has subtly worked out of everyone and pieced together.
It’s fascinating to learn the individual motives for possibly stealing the plans- gambling debts, being employed by a foreign nation, greed. Most reasons for potentially stealing the plans are petty human weakness, which ground the grandiose espionage plot in the insignificant foibles and family issues that usually make up a country house mystery.
The Incredible Theft an exciting mixture of the more traditional detective story with the emerging genre of the political thriller in the 1930s. Christie, whose international spy thrillers- which sometimes starred Hercule Poirot like The Big Four is one of her weakest novels. However, Christie’s usually laughable understanding of international spy craft explored in her novels is tempered by a smaller scale of The Incredible Theft. Her mixture of the traditional detective story with a spy thriller in The Incredible Theft is her most successful blend of the two genres.
However, even though The Incredible Theft might be Christie’s best work in the thriller genre, it’s a straightforward story with very weak red herrings and misdirections. Her clues are laid very clumsily, and many readers will find this a straightforward mystery to solve. Some might find it boring because it needs a suspenseful conclusion. Still, I enjoyed having a primer into the way Hercule Poirot goes about solving his mysteries- I am curious if, in reading other books in the series written after 1937, I will see Poirot using this method or if I, the reader will be able to apply this method to solve future stories and come to the same conclusions as Poirot.
The Incredible Theft might be a more straightforward Poirot mystery to solve since we see the man behind the curtain a little bit, but the story is still enjoyable. The characters are vampy, secretive, and constantly plotting to catch each other out as the spy. The country house tropes—which Christie uses again in different stories—flesh out and ground what could have been a campy, overblown spy thriller. It’s a good little story if a relatively slight mystery.
Golden Age of Detective Fiction 
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