Welcome to All About Agatha, the podcast dedicated to reading and ranking every single mystery

novel written by The Queen of Crime, Dame Maghe Christie. I'm Catherine Brobeck. I'm Kemper Donovan.

And this week we are returning to our beloved Monsieur Poirot. We are back again to our labors of Hercules. So what are we

covering this week, Kemper? So we are covering of course two of these short

stories. The first is the horses of

Diomedes and the second is the girdle of Hippolyta. Shall we start with

the publication history on the horses of Diomedes, Catherine? We shall. So it was first published in standalone form in the Strand in June

1940 in the UK and sometime later in January of 1945 in Ellery Queen's mystery magazine in the US.

And in the US, we've seen this again and again, and we're going to get it with our second story too.

It's called the case of the drug peddler.

A whole lot of drugging going on in this story.

So, so, so much.

And it's like less intriguing, although perhaps more accurate than the horses of diabetes.

So it will of course then be published in the labors of Hercules in 1947 by Dodd Mead in the in the US and by Collins crime in the UK both in the same year.

Fantastic. Well now it's time for a little bit of Kemper storytelling.

I am turning to my Dahller's book of Greek myths to refresh our collective

recollection as to the original story of the horses of Diomedes and And yes, this is a case where Christie goes very

metaphorical here. It's an interesting choice actually what how she chooses to tell

this specific story. So here is the horses of diabetes as told in my book of Greek myths. Far to the

north there lived a king whose name was diabetes. He was a very inhospitable king

and had trained his four mayors to devour all strangers who came to his land.

Now Eurystheus sent Heracles to capture the four man-eating mayors and bring them back alive.

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