Welcome to all about Agatha, the podcast dedicated to reading and ranking every single mystery novel written by the Queen of Crime, Dame Maggot the Christie, I'm Catherine Brobeck.

I'm Kemper Donovan.

And this week we are going murpling.

In what book are we doing it with, Kemper?

We are doing the moving finger.

Let's get into it and start off by talking about the publication history.

It was serialized first.

In the U.S. colliers, in spring 1942, and then it was published in book form in the

US in July 1942 by Dodd-Meed, but then weirdly enough it was serialized in Women's Pictorial in the fall of

1942 in the UK and then not published until June 1943 by Collins Crime almost an entire year later from its US publication

which is actually a pretty long time. It is I actually have a little bit of

intel on that so according to Janet Morgan biographer who we referenced quite a bit on this podcast, the Saturday

evening post, which was a more regular UK serializer of Christie's novels before

they were published in book form actually declined

to serialize this novel on the grounds that it started too slowly for a

newspaper serial and we come across this issue again because this is one of the few

Christie novels wherein the text differs significantly in the US. Yeah between the

US and the UK versions because the way that the US newspaper Colliers dealt with that problem was apparently

to cut about 9,000 words from the text in backstory and minor characters, I think a lot of those cuts are front loaded.

And for whatever reason, it actually does seem to have been a mistake that just got perpetuated throughout subsequent

US editions when it was published via Dodd- Mead, they used that abridged newspaper serialization.

They should have apparently used the longer

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