Welcome to All About Agatha, the podcast dedicated to reading and ranking every single

mystery novel written by the Queen of Crime Day Maggoth

Christie. I'm Catherine Brobeck. I'm Kemper Donovan and this week we are

tackling the big four first published on January 27th 1927 by of course William Collins and

sons in the UK and later the same year by Dodd Mead in the US.

However, it's a little bit trickier than that

because the book is actually an edited compilation

of a serialized short story collection

that ran in, of the sketch magazine between January

and March of 1924 and it was called the man who was number four only too much

later of course then be compiled with a

suggestion and assistance of Christie's brother-in-law at Campbell Christie.

So yeah this is an interesting one in terms of the timing.

Basically, this book, even though it was published directly

after the murder of Roger Acroyd,

was pretty clearly written before the murder of Roger Acrood.

We know that the short stories that make up the novel

were written several years before.

But it even seems like the actual compilation

of the book itself was potentially done before

acroid and the reason why this the timeline gets a little tricky here is that this

is around the period when Agath Christie was going through a really tough personal time.

...