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.

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

And this week we are very excited to talk about the classic,

the Murder of Roger Ackroyd. Agatha Christie masterpiece. the published like all of our Christie's thus far as a serialization this time in

the London Evening News from July to September of 1925 it was called who

killed Ekroyd and it was published in book form a year later in

1926 not by the bodily head but by a brand new publisher.

William Collins and Sons, which would go on to become Harper Collins,

who would be the publisher for all of the rest of Christie's novels and in fact to this day are still the

publisher in both the UK and the US for her estate.

So just to bring us up to speed on the publishing history of Christie's novels.

The Bodley head published the mysterious affair styles, the first novel, and she had to deal

with them off of that novel for five more novels.

Over time, however, she grew tired of the bodily head. They disagreed on things like covers.

And she grew to feel that the advances in royalty she was getting on those books could

have been a lot better, especially as her book started to do better.

So she was eager to run out the contract and running out she did with the secret adversary,

the murder on the links, the man in the brown suit, and then there was a quote unquote long short story

that she stretched out into a novel and that novel was rejected as she expected

it would be and then the final novel she published was The Secret of Chimneys with the Bodley

head.

As we noted, it felt like a little bit of a rush job.

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