Welcome to all about Agatha, the podcast dedicated to reading and ranking every single

mystery novel written by the Queen of Crime,

Dame Agathichristy.

I'm Catherine Brobeck, and I'm Kemper Donovan.

And this week we are doing murderous easy.

I suppose we should before diving right in

talk a little bit about the publication history.

This one was first published by, of course, Collins Crime Club in June of 1939 and then in the

U.S. in September of the same year under the title easy to kill.

I will also note this is another case where apparently the US and UK

UK editions are different.

We came across that in three-act tragedy and we're going to see it again in the moving finger.

It's not all that significant here because apparently what happened is that the US publishers were relying on the serialized version when they

compiled it for the book publication and there had been a lot of stuff that had

been cut for length. I got to say I kind of wish I read the shorter US version because there are certainly are a lot of

characters and a lot of incidents within the story but we will talk about that.

We will.

Since we have so many characters to talk about, I guess we should jump right on into the victim, and that is Miss Lavinia Pinkerton.

And she's an elderly lady, and she's traveling to London to speak with Scotland's yard about a serial

killer in her village like one does. Unfortunately after she disemarks that train she is run down by a car in White Hall before

making it to Scotland Yard headquarters.

Right, and while Lavinia Pinkerton is our first victim to die within the pages of this book and our main victim in

...