And Then There Were 4: Elephants Can Remember by Agatha Christie

All About Agatha Christie

Catherine Brobeck & Kemper Donovan

Tv & Film, Books, Film Reviews, Arts

4.7 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 7 May 2022

⏱️ 161 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

It's been a while since we’ve done a Stefon, so here goes. This episode has everything: twins, wigs, continuity errors, Hercule Poirot and Ariadne Oliver (surely the model upon which Will & Grace were built) teaming up one last time, and of course, Dr. Mark Aldridge, co-host extraordinaire. It’s time to find out if elephants really can remember! (Spoiler: they mainly can’t.)

You can find bonus content at: http://www.patreon.com/allaboutagatha.

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 Agatha Christie.
0:14.7	I am Ken Verdanaven, and this is a novel episode. We are discussing Elephants Can Remember.
0:22.1	My good friend Mark Aldridge will be joining later on in the episode.
0:26.4	But first, before we get to Elephants Can Remember, I have some housekeeping or perhaps I should say
0:32.9	mailbag business to attend to because this is the portion of the episode where I get to share
0:39.6	some of the messages all of you sent to me. So first up is horse abuse. That's right, horse abuse.
0:46.8	Many of you pointed out that there was a pretty obvious answer to my bemusement as to this detail
0:52.4	we got in nemesis of Miss Marple mentioning how the youths these days were doing such crazy, crazy things
0:59.7	like putting horses eyes out. On the episode, I was like, what on earth is that about? And many of you
1:05.2	responded with, uh, it's equist duh. Actually, you were all much nicer than that. You very kindly
1:11.6	pointed out that this is the same outrage committed in that Oso Modern 1973 play by Peter Schafer,
1:19.7	who incidentally is the identical twin brother of Antony Schafer, who wrote the used to
1:24.6	know of death on the Nile and evil under the sun adaptations, uh, among such other gems as
1:29.6	sleuth, which Catherine and I covered on a Patreon episode. That is not the last time that we
1:35.0	will be discussing identical twins in this episode. I'm sad to say. But even given that explanation
1:41.3	as to Equis, there's still an extra wrinkle here because nemesis was published in 1971,
1:47.4	whereas Equis was neither written nor performed until 1973. So what gives? Well, I hate to have
1:54.7	to tell you this, but Peter Schafer was inspired by a real life event that took place in 1971,
2:01.7	maybe in Suffolk where a young man, maybe a stable hand used a spike of some sort to blind,
2:09.6	maybe six, maybe as many as 26 horses. Yikes. So there you go. Christy must have heard about the same
2:17.1	event and put it in her book. A very strange tie that binds nemesis and Equis, but I thought you
2:22.8	would all appreciate that. All right, next item we have to discuss the question of whether or not
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