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

mystery novel written by the Queen of Crime

Dame Magath the Christie.

I'm Catherine Brobeck.

And I'm Kemper Donovan.

And this week we are doing a novel.

And it is a Poiro Bienster.

It is the point of death.

Kemper, what can you tell us about the publication history?

So it was first published actually in the U.S.

as a serial in Collier's Weekly, and that was in the second half of 1937.

Then it was serialized in the UK under a different title.

This title was A Date with Death.

So it actually had an alternate title in the UK before being

published later in 1938 in novel form as appointment with death. But in this

UK serialization which happened to be in the Daily Mail, I suppose the Daily Mail has changed a bit since then.

There is a famous introduction that Christie wrote, which appeared a couple of days before the first installment.

And this is the introduction where we get this, the quote from her,

in which she calls Monsieur Poirot,

this detestable, bombastic, tiresome little creature.

So when we talk about Christie getting frustrated with Poirot after doing this glut of Poiroz in the 30s,

this is where that comes from in this sense that Christie didn't like her

...