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 we are discussing a novel in this episode.

That novel would be Hickory, Dickery, Doc.

Let's just get right into it because I know

we both have a lot of thoughts about this one.

Can you tell us a little bit about the publication

history? Yeah, it was first published in Installments in John Bull in the UK, beginning in May of

1955, and then it was similarly published in installments in Colliers Weekly in the

U.S. in October of 1955.

It was published in book form by Colton's Crime at the end of October of that same year and then by Dodd-Meed in the US next month, so in November of 1955.

Right, and of course in the US it was titled Hickory, Dickery, Death.

You know, apparently Christie wrote this in the first months of 1955 at Nimrood, that was where

the archaeological dig was happening that her husband Sir Max Malloyan went to every year.

And I am happy to report that this is the last title of Agith the Christies derived from a nursery rhyme.

Apparently, Christie had at some point some alternate ideas like she had toyed around

with using Hickory Dickory Doc as a title for a mystery novel for quite

some time because she has some musings in her notebooks which John Curran has made note of himself.

In one she was thinking about doing a story in which a character has a complex about the word doc that it would be like some sort of a terror story and then also at another point she had an idea where the first

murder would happen at one o'clock and then the second at two o'clock and so on

but she ended up not pursuing any of those I think this is the most useless of the nursery

rhyme titles because it truly doesn't inform the mystery whatsoever.

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