A Miss Marple Nightcap: The Herb of Death by Agatha Christie

All About Agatha Christie

Catherine Brobeck & Kemper Donovan

Tv & Film, Books, Film Reviews, Arts

4.7 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 3 February 2018

⏱️ 37 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

We've all experienced the well-worn trope of the unreliable female narrator at this point, but in this story we have the rare example of the *unwilling* female narrator... with quite interesting results. So join us, as our poor hostess Dolly Bantry is cajoled into telling a tale of vegetal mayhem and murder. Just don't call her Mrs. B.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to All About Agatha, the podcast dedicated to reading and ranking every single
0:09.5	mystery novel written by the Queen of Crime Dame Agatha Christie. I'm Kemper Donovan.
0:14.7	I'm Catherine Broback. And this week we are tackling a short story in this
0:20.9	marble short story at that. Catherine, tell us what that story is and when and where it was published.
0:28.0	Well, we are dealing with, as we have mentioned before the Herb of Death and it was first published in
0:36.1	the Storyteller magazine in March of 1930 and we should note up front this is a Dolly Bantry story.
0:44.4	Who's quickly becoming one of my favorite characters within the Marvel verse?
0:48.8	Oh, I'm a fan, yeah.
0:50.4	Okay. So a Lady of Christie who you don't loath.
0:52.6	There are you.
0:53.6	All right, let's get right into it and talk about our victim who is Sylvia Keene,
0:59.4	a beautiful 20 year old ward of Sir Ambrose Bursey.
1:04.3	She dies at the estate of Clutteram Court
1:07.2	after a dinner party during which she was accidentally poisoned
1:11.3	when the cook added a mixture of sage and foxglove, oops, leaves to the duck stuffing.
1:17.0	While everyone else got sick but survived, poor Sylvia did not.
1:21.0	So who are suspects? Well, mean obviously the cook that would be that
1:28.2	would probably be suspect number one if you were poisoned even though you know it's an accident she was the one who prepared the
1:35.1	deadly duck stuffing and she also was very accustomed to using the herbs from
1:40.5	their own garden. Next we have Sir Ambrose Bursee, owner of Clotterum Court, and he's a courtly old man of about 60 who
1:48.2	dotes on his 40 years younger ward.
1:51.9	He also happens to be ailing from a heart condition. Right so we have then mod why and she's at
	...

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