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 Kemper Donovan.

I'm Catherine Brobeck.

And this week, we are not discussing a novel.

We are discussing a short story and a bit of a different short story at that, namely Detective Parker Pine and the case of the

discontented soldier.

I suppose the best way to get into this is to actually talk about the

publication history since it's a little complicated, right Catherine?

Yeah, it is and it's a little bit weird which I think that that can just be said about these

Parker Pine stories so okay well it was first published in the US in

Cosmopolitan magazine in August 1932 not Hell and Gearly Brown version.

That would have been a little bit more exciting, like,

raise the illustrations in it.

I kind of wish it was the Hell and Gearly Brown version.

I mean, I suppose there

very much ways of which this story too could be spiced up by that. It was

published with a bunch of the other stories that ultimately are the Park

Pine stories and they were all called Are You Happy question mark if not consult Mr

Parker Pine? Which is the way that his ad reads that he puts in the newspapers?

Right.

So then it gets published in the UK later, October 15th, 1932 in women's pictorial, but then it has another title because this is now called

the case as a discontented soldier but is also called Adventure by request and

...