All About Opera: The Face of Helen & Swan Song by Agatha Christie

All About Agatha Christie

Catherine Brobeck & Kemper Donovan

Tv & Film, Books, Film Reviews, Arts

4.7 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 6 April 2019

⏱️ 56 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

It's another special double episode, this one focusing on the world of opera and Christie's personal love of music. In our first story we attend Covent Garden with Mr. Satterthwaite and the mysterious Mr. Quin, while in the second it's a private theatrical extravaganza starring world-renowned prima donna Paula Nazorkoff. As anyone familiar with the plots of many an opera will know, it doesn't take long for things to get rather murder-y....

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to All About Agatha, the podcast dedicated to reading and ranking every single mystery novel written by The Queen of Crime, Dame Magathicristy.
0:14.0	I'm Catherine Brobeck.
0:15.0	And I'm Kemper Donovan.
0:16.0	And this week we are doing a double short story episode.
0:21.0	And I know, much like our recent double Viaras-Kob a short story
0:27.7	episode this has a theme and the theme this time is opera. Indeed, this time is opera. This is an opera themed episode. We are covering two short stories here. The first will be the face of Helen
0:48.8	Which is a mysterious Mr. Quinn story and the second is entitled Swan Song, which is our final installment
0:55.6	from the Listerdale Mystery Collection.
0:58.7	I suppose we should start off with the face of Helen.
1:02.5	Catherine Broba, can you tell us a little bit about the publication history of this one?
1:05.6	Sure, it was published first in the UK in the storyteller magazine as a bunch of these
1:10.5	were in April 1927. Under the title title The Magic of Mr. Quinn number five which
1:16.4	is not a particularly compelling title and then in the US in August.
1:23.2	That's in here in Detective Story magazine.
1:26.1	And then, of course, it was also
1:27.7	published in the Mysterious Mr. Quinn collection
1:30.5	in 1930.
1:31.9	All right.
1:32.4	Well, let's discuss our victim in this case who is Jillian West.
1:37.5	We have decided to pronounce her name Jillian.
1:40.5	Catherine and I were doing a little inventory of those with the name spelled G I L L L I A N we know of or know in our lives and the vast majority of them go by Jillian not Gillian although we do acknowledge that it is very possible that her name is supposed to be Gillian
1:59.7	yeah that her name is supposed to be Gillian but we are going to call her Jillian throughout.
	...

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