Welcome to All About Agatha, the podcast dedicated to reading and ranking every single mystery novel written by the Queen of Crime, Dame Agatha Christie.

I'm Camper Donovan.

I'm Catherine Brobeck.

And this week we are doing a mysterious Mr. Quinn short story at The Bells and Motley coming off of our novel Murder is Easy which also featured

a pub of that same name sadly we are not in Witcham under Ash in this story and they don't

seem to be related in any way whatsoever so you know maybe that's a little

a little glitch in the Christie verse although I suppose there could be two pubs with the same name in different places in England.

That's fine. In any case, Catherine Brobeck, tell us a little bit about the publication history of this one.

So it was first published in The

Grand magazine in November 1925 in the UK and then it was published in

July of 1926 so the next year in the US in Flynn's Weekly.

It was actually entitled A Man of Magic when it was first published in the Grand

magazine. Yet another alternate title to chew on for a Christie story. It's not a particularly

inspiring alternate title I have to say. No, nor does it necessarily make that much sense? Well, it kind make I mean there are magician-ish characters

at play here is. Let's not spoil things. Why don't you tell us about the

victim? Yes let's talk about our victims because we have three possible victims here.

It's a little unclear until we get to our resolution who the victim is and who the perpetrator is.

So our victim is and who the perpetrator is.

So our victim list and our suspect list are going to kind of blend together

and have a fuzzy border, much fuzzier border than they normally do.

It depends on the angle at which you view the story who the victim is, I suppose.

Hmm, exactly.

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