Now, as it happens, I do most of my Agatha reading in the decent but dull (and incomplete) Heron edition bought on ebay and noticed at reference 1. So I was pleased to come across a more authentic edition of the well known Poirot story 'After the Funeral', sushade for television in 2005. Originally published in 1954 at what was then the significant sum of 10/6 but sold in this Book Club Selection edition for 3/6. And subsequently sold to me for what I thought was the slightly strong price of £2.50, nearly ten times the Book Club price. Just as well that it was for a good cause.
And apart from that, I also thought that the cover was worth it. The real fifties flavour for a trashy novel, this one struggling to engage with the new tone set for sex & violence by Ian Fleming in 'Casino Royale' the year before. A sort of bridge between the thirties and the sixties.
And while Agatha is attempting, not altogether successfully, to update her formula, we were left wondering whether she read any Fleming herself? Do writers read the opposition or do they rely on their publishers to tell them what they need to know?
There was, of course, no way that she could have foreseen how she would be picked up by the heritage branch of the television industry, much more interested in steam locomotion and the domestic arrangements in the small country houses of that time than in sex & violence.
PS: adding the book to the collection, I collected a bonus point as this particular yarn was hitherto missing.
Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/agatha.html.
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