Still in the formative years of his career, Hercule Poirot faces a most taxing who killed Lord Cronshaw? Was Coco Courtenay’s death on the same night a mere coincidence? And did she deliberately take an overdose of cocaine?
No sooner has Poirot revealed his astonishing powers of deduction than he is faced with seventeen other mysteries to test his soon-to-be-famous ‘little grey cells’.
As a matter of courtesy to a group of young people, he endeavours to solve the gruesome murder of a woman whose body they have stumbled upon whilst locked out of their flat, and with his usual precision and elan he discovers exactly how ‘Mary, Mary quite contrary’ makes her garden grow…
Dame Agatha Mary Clarissa Christie, Lady Mallowan, DBE (née Miller) was an English writer known for her 66 detective novels and 14 short story collections, particularly those revolving around fictional detectives Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple. She also wrote the world's longest-running play, the murder mystery The Mousetrap, which has been performed in the West End of London since 1952. A writer during the "Golden Age of Detective Fiction", Christie has been called the "Queen of Crime". She also wrote six novels under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott. In 1971, she was made a Dame (DBE) by Queen Elizabeth II for her contributions to literature. Guinness World Records lists Christie as the best-selling fiction writer of all time, her novels having sold more than two billion copies.
This best-selling author of all time wrote 66 crime novels and story collections, fourteen plays, and six novels under a pseudonym in romance. Her books sold more than a billion copies in the English language and a billion in translation. According to Index Translationum, people translated her works into 103 languages at least, the most for an individual author. Of the most enduring figures in crime literature, she created Hercule Poirot and Miss Jane Marple. She atuhored The Mousetrap, the longest-running play in the history of modern theater.