Welcome to All About Agatha, the podcast dedicated to reading and ranking every single mystery novel written by The Queen of Crime, Dame Maggotha Christie. I'm

Catherine Brobeck. And we are covering a novella.

We have one of Christie's rare novellas to cover again, always a treat.

Catherine, what are we discussing?

We are discussing Dead Man's Mirror.

Kemper, why does the publication history?

Well, Dead Man's Mirror, similar to the last of these novellas

that we covered, Murder in the Muse,

was originally a short story that was subsequently expanded.

So the true initial publication of Dead Man's Mirror was as the short story,

The Second Gong, which was published in Ladies Home Journal in June 1932 in the US, and then just one month later in the UK in the Strand.

And that short story because it was very soon thereafter expanded into Dead Man's Mirror does not show up in

book form until our grab bag of latter day problem Palensse Bay in 1991.

So it took a long, long journey from serialization

to being collected in book form.

But as we mentioned, this was of course expanded into the

novella Dead Man's Mirror which was collected in Murder in the Muse and

other stories first published in the UK by Collins Crime Club of course in March

1937 and then in the US under the title Dead Man's Mirror since as we mentioned

Muse is not really a word that American audiences would be all that familiar with.

So Dead Man's Mirror was the name of the collection in the US and that was in June of 1937 that the collection appeared on this side of the pond.

So that is the rather torturous publication history of this novella.

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