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 Broback.

And this week we are tackling one of Christie's short stories, another Poiro from her first collection.

This is the million dollar bond robbery, first published in the Sketch magazine, May 2nd,

1923. So let's get right into this. Our victim is a little

unorthodox in that... There's not really a victim. There's not really a victim

because this is actually one of the few Christie stories that is not a murder mystery.

There is no murder here. The victim is the London and Scottish Bank, I guess we could say. The bank has been fleeced of a million dollars in Liberty Bond and

presumably any American parties who were interested in having business

dealings with this bank.

To the tune of those million dollars will also be victimized by this crime.

To a certain extent, there is one man more than any other who is also victimized that is

Philip Ridgeway who is a promising young banker and his career is going off the

rails a bit because everyone thinks that he is the one who somehow stole

the bonds or was at least responsible for the bonds being stolen.

And with that in mind, let's get to the suspects.

So suspect number one is Philip Bridgway who I mean he was the guy in charge of the

bonds yeah so I mean clearly the person carrying the bonds that have gone missing is probably a little bit suspect

He was given them in a special portmanteau with special locks to basically ferry

across the Atlantic on a luxury lender the Olympia. It's a very special case

...