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 Camper Donovan. I'm

Catherine Brobeck. And we are so excited because this is a novel episode.

We have, yeah, we have quite a novel to cover. Catherine, what are we discussing

today? We are covering one of Dame Agatha's favorite of her own novels,

Crooked House. Crooked House. Yeah, you know that when the novel has a foreword by Christie in which she talks about what a pleasure it was to write that this is one where she has strong feelings because she definitely does not do that very often.

Right.

Why don't you tell us a little bit about the history of Crockett House, Kemper?

So Crockett House was first published in novel form in March 1949 by Dodd-Meed in, then in May 1949 by Collins Crime Club of

course in the UK. A condensed version of it ran in Cosmopolitan magazine in the US in October of 1948 and a

serialized version in John Bull in the UK in seven installments from April to

June of 1949.

Little tidbit from Agatha that she shared in a Times interview in the 60s.

Apparently the ending to this novel, which we will of course get to, was so shocking that Collins, her UK publisher, wanted her to change it.

They, I suppose, were so shocked and upset and horrified by it, and she stuck to her guns as she so often did when it came to her

writing and she refused to change it and I think we are all the better for it and

let's not forget I know that I've mentioned this before In her autobiography she identifies two titles as her favorite

titles among all of her books. The first is Crooked House. The second is ordeal by innocence.

So we've got that other title to look forward to and let's get right

into it, Catherine Brobeck, who is our first victim? It's Erastide Leonides, who is an

88 year old food industry tycoon from Smyrna,

Smyrna now part of Turkey,

but it was part of ancient Greece.

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