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

Catherine Brobeck. And this week we are exploring an Erkeel Poirot short story

and not just any Poiro short story the very first

for a short story ever.

The affair at the victory ball.

This is very exciting.

Very exciting.

It was published after of course the Mysterious

So it's published on March 7th, 1993 in our old front the sketch.

Love the sketch.

Right.

In collection form it gets a little bit weirder. As a long time

listeners know, we covered everything that's in Poiro investigates, which was the

first major Poiro short story collection.

This is not actually published in collection form until much later.

First, it's in the U.S. in 1951, in the underdog and other stories.

And then in the UK, it's not published until Poiro's early cases

all the way in September 1974.

I mean, it's curious that these short stories which are perfectly good

Poiro short stories these early ones collected in that edition weren't published

before I believe that they were published in 1974 because that was when Christie,

understandably, the octogenarian that she was,

...