The Capture of Cerberus

It has always been a minor mystery to Christie scholars why ‘The Capture of Cerberus’ did not appear in The Strand magazine after the other 11 Labours, as it seemed an inexplicable omission. The discover,’ of a hitherto unknown and unpublished version of the story, with a completely different setting and plot, may now allow us to solve this puzzle.

In ‘The Capture of Cerberus’ Poirot once more looks for a missing person, and in this respect his twelfth Labour resembles similar missions in ‘The Lernean Hydra’ and ‘The Girdle of Hyppolita’. But there all similarity’ ends, as this final task has an unprecedented aspect—his quarry is dead.

Although Collins Crime Club eventually published The Labours of Hercules on 8 September 1947, with Christie adding an introductory Foreword to explain the rationale for Poirot’s undertaking (see Chapter 11), the twelfth story’s non-appearance in The Strand remained puzzling. The magazine had always provided a ready market for Christie short stories throughout the 1930s and into the 1940s, with her name emblazoned on the cover as a selling point. Christie herself explicitly mentions this story in the Foreword to the 1953 Penguin edition of The Labours of Hercules when she explains that in the writing of the stories, ‘over the final Capture of Cerberus I gave way completely to despair’. She left it aside for six months and ‘then suddenly, one day coming up on the escalator on the Tube the idea came. Thinking excitedly about it, I went up and down on the escalator about eight times.’ But, as we shall see, while this may be the truth, it is not the entire truth…