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 and I'm

Catherine Brobeck and this week we are doing a little bit of a special episode

in that this is our first foray into Agatha Christie as playwright with the witness for the prosecution.

And the witness for the prosecution actually started off not as a play, but as a short story written not shockingly in the 20s which was

when she wrote it just it's just insane to me how many stories she wrote in the

20s but this one was originally called Trader Hands, and it was written on

January 31st, 1925, not in the sketch, but in a magazine called Flynn's Weekly.

It wasn't until 1933 that the story was published as witness for the prosecution in the

Hound of Death collection in the UK, and in the US it actually wasn't published under that name

until 1948 in a collection of the same name.

So let's just get into a brief synopsis

of what happens in what is for Christie

a rather simple and straightforward story.

So witness for the prosecution basically has two variants of the plot.

There's the short story plot and then there's the play and adaptation plot.

But they start from the same premise, which is that a man has been accused of murder.

That man's name is Leonard Vole, and he's a good-looking charming young fellow who's sort of an

amiable drifter, short on money but with an abundance of friends and admirers.

He actually reminded me a little bit of Ag of the Christie's near-du-well brother,

Monte the way she describes him in her autobiography. But unlike Monte, this man has

been charged with murder, the murder of one of his admirers, Miss Emily French, a rich elderly spinster who we're told has eight, that's right, eight cats, and who takes a liking to Leonard after he rescues her parcels from an oncoming bus.

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