Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming

to you from the QI offices in Covern Garden. My name is Dan Schreiber and I'm sitting

here with Anichezinski, James Harkin and Andrew Hunter Murray and once again we have gathered

around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days and in no particular

order here we go. Starting with fact number one and that is my fact. My fact this week is that

the Icelandic version of Agatha Christie's Lord Edgewear dies, took over ten years to complete

because the translator couldn't work out how to translate two words. Firstly, spoiler alert

in Lord Edgewear dies. Yes. You know what I don't think you understand crime fiction

Andy, it's not like you have to wait till the end for the big reveal about who dies. What

were the two words, Dan? Do you know? I don't know, so the reason I don't know is I read

this in an article on the Guardian by the author, the translator of these books called Ragnar

Jhonerson and I think for the reasons of not wanting to do the ultimate spoiler alert

he's not included the two words. Because they're like the ultimate words in the whole

story. Yes, so this is the thing. These two words are it's a bit of wordplay that Agatha Christie

used in the book. It's the clue basically to the to solving the murder and in Icelandic

he just couldn't work out how to do it and he's been translating Agatha Christie books

since he was 17 years old and he started with Endless Night. The reason he picked it was

because it was the slimest volume but he convinced the publishing house that that was a really

good one to start with but it was actually it was just really short. He's quite a famous

author in Iceland I think. He is, yeah, Ragnar Jhonerson, was it? Yes. And his books have

been translated into English by a guy called Quentin Bates who's also a writer but I couldn't

see if any of his books have been translated into other languages. According to him the hardest

...