One is that it is just a short space of time from the moment Poirot arrives on the scene to when he delivers his denouement speech – approximately four days by my reckoning. There were two particular aspects of this book which struck me as I was reading it. It’s an off-shoot of the slightly melodramatic style. When a second character makes it clear that they have made a great discovery about how the crime was committed, you just know that this character is also going to be murdered within a matter of hours.

In the best Hastings tradition, Amy appends a plan of the dig house so that we can see for ourselves how tight-knit a community it is, and how unlikely it is that the crime could be committed without anyone else knowing. She warns us that she’s not much of a writer and isn’t very learned in matters of grammar but this only goes to make us warm to the character even more. The frontispiece and first chapter being written by Dr Reilly makes the opening structure to the book a little clunky, but by the time the story gets going you completely forget about how it is that Amy gets to write the story in the first place.

It’s a style that works very well because you get to know the intimate thoughts of another person directly involved in the case, and not just the amazing workings of the Poirot brain. In this book, Christie returned to the first-person narrator style, the narrator in question being Nurse Amy Leatheran – Captain Hastings, presumably, still occupied in The Argentine. The full book of Murder in Mesopotamia was first published in the UK in July 1936, and in the US shortly after. This version provided some of the characters with different names: Dr and Mrs Leidner were originally Dr and Mrs Trevor, and Amy Leatheran was Amy Seymour. The book was originally published in the US in magazine format in the Saturday Evening Post during November and December 1935 in the UK, an abridged version was published in eight instalments in Women’s Pictorial Magazine under the title No Other Love.

The story takes place in the wilds of ancient Babylonia and Assyria, where Christie had visited with her husband Max Mallowan and it is largely accepted that the character of Louise Leidner is based on Katharine Woolley, stalwart of many archaeological digs, and the person to whom Christie had previously dedicated (along with her husband) The Thirteen Problems. If you haven’t read the book yet, don’t worry, I promise not to tell you whodunit!Ĭhristie dedicated the book to “my many archaeological friends in Iraq and Syria”. There’s a motley crew of archaeologists and assistants working there – and one of them must have done it! As you would expect, Hercule Poirot gets to the bottom of this case fairly quickly. In which Hercule Poirot encounters an archaeological dig in Iraq, only to discover that the wife of the leader of the dig has been murdered in a seemingly impossible manner.

Hercule poirot murder in mesopotamia