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 Catherine Brobeck. I'm

Kemper Donovan. And this week we are doing an extremely interesting book that I

imagine a lot of our listeners will have a lot of thoughts on we certainly do

Yeah, let's just say that it is a rare dark and stormy night here in Los Angeles when we are

recording this episode.

I for one had to change my normal recording location because of pounding rain, which, you know,

we don't normally get here.

And that is quite appropriate because we are covering the pale horse.

biblical quote, right? From the book of revelation, we actually get it quoted in full at the end of the book, so let's just go ahead and set the tone right now.

And I looked and behold a pale horse, and his name that sat on him was death, and hell followed with him.

To start us off on a perhaps later note, this was first published in book form in November

of 1961 by Collins Crime in the UK and then in 1962 by Dodd Mead in the

U.S. it was serialized shortly before the UK Book Publication in Women's Mirror in the fall of

1961 and in a condensed form in the US and Ladies Home Journal in spring of 1962, which strikes me comfort as an extremely weird place to publish this.

Yes, that's an interesting choice.

I have two publishing related or provenance related tidbits

before we get into the story proper.

Eagle-eyed readers may note that we have a rare gap here

in the Christie bibliography because Cat Among the Pigeons came out in the UK in 1959 and this book didn't come out until 1961.

So there was no Christie novel for Christmas in 1960.

Of course there was something put out in the UK.

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