Pre and Post-1914 Short Stories

Dumb Witness 5 July 1937 Emily Arundell writes to Hercule Poirot on 17 April but he does not receive the letter until 28 June. And by then she is dead. Poirot goes to Market Basing to investigate her death, where the case involves spiritualism, a brooch, a dog’s ball—and another death. Most of the notes for Dumb Witness, roughly 25 pages, are contained in Notebook 30 along with notes for Death on the Nile and the newly discovered short story вЂThe Incident of the Dog’s Ball’; the relationship between the novel and its earlier incarnation as the short story (albeit with a vital difference) is considered in detail in the Appendix. Dumb Witness was published at the end of 1936 in the US as a Saturday Evening Post serial with the title Poirot Loses a Client, and as Mystery at Littlegreen House in a UK serialisation beginning in February 1937. In connection with the US serialisation, a surviving letter dated June 1936 from Edmund Cork to Christie thanks her for the revised version sent to the Saturday Evening Post magazine (who paid $16,000 for it, $2,000 more than Cards on the Table) ...»