Christie (Agatha) Poirot Investigates

London, John Lane The Bodley Head, 1928.

‘Cheap Edition’. 8vo. Original orange cloth decorated and lettered in black. Dust-jacket, priced 2/-.

Eleven early Poirot cases (including ‘The Adventure of the Egyptian Tomb’ and ‘The Kidnapped Prime Minister’), collected from their original magazine appearances in The Sketch and first published in book form by the Bodley Head in March 1924 for Christie’s fourth book, and the earliest to gather her short fiction.

This is the 1928 “Cheap Edition,” a third setting reduced to 2/- and to a smaller trim size than the original 7/6 first edition, in the second of two recorded binding states: red cloth bearing John Lane’s monogram to cover and spine, with updated endpapers and copyright page, as distinct from an ostensibly transitional first state in blue cloth without these revisions, seemingly assembled in part from older printed stock ahead of a full reprint. The jacket abandons the original edition’s W. Smithson Broadhead illustration, itself reprinted from a 1923 Sketch drawing, in favour of new artwork by Wyndham Payne (1884–1974), the self-taught English illustrator and printmaker best known for his Methuen jacket to The Wind in the Willows, who designed a run of Bodley Head covers for Christie in this period; his archive is now held at the V&A.