Welcome to All About Agatha, the podcast dedicated to reading and ranking every single mystery novel written by the Queen of Crime, Dane Agatha Christie, I'm Kemper Donovan, and

Catherine Grobeck. And this is the case of the middle-aged wife, a Parker Pine Investigate Story. This is the first short story within the collection.

We already covered the second short story, the case of the discontented soldier.

So we are going back. we are covering number one here

Parker Pine is always a little bit of a different beast within the Christie

Cannon not really a detective has much more of a romantic bench than any of Christie's other detectives

with the possible exception of Mr Quinn. I suppose we should get right into it.

Catherine, tell us about the publication history.

Well it was published on October 8th,

1932 in women's pictorial, under a different name,

the woman concerned, which, um, I'm going to be honest with you, Kember, would have been preferable to me had that remained the title.

You're not such a fan of the title here are you Catherine the case of the middle-aged wife

not such a fan of the story possibly is it that the story upset you or that you

actually didn't like the story or think the story was well done.

I feel this way about the Parker Pine Collection in general.

I don't think that I come down negatively on them.

I just also don't think they're that interesting.

So I'm coming from a place of prejudice

and I apologize to all of our dear listeners

and to you if you really adored the story.

I certainly don't adore this story. I think a lot of what makes

it upsetting though is obviously purposeful. Oh, it's definitely purposeful, but I mean it does feel a little bit,

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