And Then There Were 46: Dumb Witness by Agatha Christie

All About Agatha Christie

Catherine Brobeck & Kemper Donovan

Arts, Books, Tv & Film, Film Reviews

4.7 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 16 March 2018

⏱️ 59 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Real talk: we are not big fans of this one. But we *are* big fans of the three dogs discussed herein: 1) fictional dog Bob, our titular "dumb witness" (though whether he ever actually witnessed anything is... questionable); 2) Christie's real-life faithful companion Peter, to whom this book is dedicated; and 3) actor dog Snubby, for whom David Suchet apparently fell as hard as his version of Hercule Poirot did in the televised adaptation. And it isn't often we get to celebrate man's best friend in the course of discussing a murder mystery. We just wish the puzzle mystery could have been more up to Dame Agatha's habitually high standard.

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 Prime Dame Agatha Christie.
0:14.6	I'm Catherine Brobeck and I'm Kemper Donovan.
0:17.2	And this week we are doing a Poirot novel.
0:21.2	What is it Kemper?
0:22.4	This is dumb witness. Yes, I think it might be
0:26.3	six of nine Poiro novels that we have in a row now. But who's counting?
0:31.3	Someone is apparently.
0:34.0	This one was first published at the end of 1936 in the U.S.
0:38.0	actually as a serial in the Saturday evening post
0:42.0	under the much better title of Poiro Loses a
0:45.7	client and then it was titled again as a serial in the UK in the beginning of
0:51.0	1937 in February as Mystery at Little Green House.
0:55.0	So you will notice that neither of those titles is dumb witness, which we'll get
1:00.5	into, but I think is a little bit of a dumb title see what I did there.
1:04.0	In any case they were both published in book form a little bit later on July 5th
1:09.3	1937 in the UK by of course Collins Crime Club and then later that same year in the UK by, of course, Collins Crime Club.
1:13.4	And then later that same year in the US by, of course,
1:16.5	Dodd Mead, but in the US the title remained,
1:19.5	Poirot loses a client.
1:21.2	I'm just gonna put it out there right now. I was not a huge fan of this novel.
1:24.8	This novel originally existed as a short story, which is something that Mr. John Curran
1:30.3	discovered and expounded upon in his fantastic book, Agatha Christie's secret
	...

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