Welcome to All About Agatha, the podcast dedicated to reading and drinking every single mystery novel written by the Queen of Crime Dame Agatha Christie.

I'm Kember Donovan.

I'm a slightly frazzled, Catherine Brobeck.

And this week in our continuing quarantine here in 2020 we are discussing I'm happy to say a pretty

delightful Poirot short story Catherine what are we discussing?

We broached this once before but we're doing the labors of Hercules.

This week we are going to talk a little bit about that as a whole and then we're also going to talk about

the Nemean lion which is the first story in the collection.

Yes, we did cover already the capture of Cerberus in our Countess Rosicoff themed episode episode but we have not covered any of the remaining 11

labors so we have the lion's share of them to.

Oh no, no, that's a terrible.

You've been dad punning one too many times, Kumper.

Catherine, could you tell us a little bit about the publication history of the

Nemean Lion and the Labors of Hercules as a whole? Yeah it was first published in

November 1939 but again it's the first story in the Labors of Hercules, which was published first by

Dodd Meade in the U.S. and then by Collins Crime in the UK in 1947.

Yes and we should mention the magazine that published the story in the UK in 1939 was our old friend the Strand

and that it was also serialized in the US a little later in 1944 in Ellery Queen's

Mystery magazine under the title the case of the Kidnapped

Pekinies.

The whole set up to this right is about the mythology behind Hercules or might I say

a cule whether or not that's relevant to these stories we're going to talk about a little bit, but hey, I like it.

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