The Market Basing Mystery

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  • Hercule Poirot
  • 1951

Locked room mystery; it looks like a wealthy recluse committed suicide, but how when the wound is on the wrong side of his head? From Poirot’s Early Cases and The Under Dog and Other Stories.

More about this story

Inspector Japp and Poirot are solid friends but they have different views of how to solve the death of a local man in the village of Market Basing. It would appear to be suicide by handgun. But all is not what is seems when the housekeeper points out that the gun was in the victim’s left hand, whilst he had been right-handed. This is an early working of Agatha Christie’s novella length, Murder in the Mews.

It first appeared in book form the US collection The Under Dog and Other Stories in 1951. The story first appeared in book form in the UK in 1966 in the collection Thirteen for Luck!, but its first appearance in an Agatha Christie only collection was in 1974 in Poirot’s Early Cases.

This story was not adapted for TV because Agatha Christie’s rewritten version, Murder in the Mews, featured in season one of Agatha Christie’s Poirot in 1989, starring David Suchet, and followed a similar plot and structure.

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