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 covering a short story, the jewel robbery at the Grand Metropolitan. the originally on March 14th, 1923.

The title at that point was The Curious Disappearance

of the Opelson Pearls, which is a perfect segue

into the victim of this story who is in fact Mrs Opelson. A wealthy rather pudgy woman.

There, a slight tangent, there are a lot of references made to her appearance in the story.

I do notice that.

It's really kind of offensive.

It's like dwelled on in a way that may be uncomfortable.

It's dwelled on a way that may be uncomfortable, but I have a little bit of a theory.

Some say that Agatha Christie's first husband, Archie Christie, one of the reasons that their

marriage started going south is that he thought she lost her figure

after she had given birth to Rosalind that she never really went back to the

sprite-like more elfin younger woman that she was before she gave birth.

Yeah, and that was perhaps one of the reasons why they started having issues, one among many,

so maybe she was overly sensitive about this and this was her way of kind of

projecting that anxiety into some of her writing.

I mean that makes sense, but I mean it comes up repeatedly let's be clear it's not as short

as some of the other short stories that we read but it is short in content yeah

and it is long on addressing Mrs. Opelson's weight issues.

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