The blog Books Tell You Why reminds us that today would have been mystery-fiction writer Agatha Christie’s 128th birthday. (She died back in 1976.) To commemorate the occasion, I’m doing what seems appropriate for this page: posting a couple of fronts from Christie’s extensive oeuvre. Above, you will find the 1949 Pocket Books paperback edition of There Is a Tide …, a Hercule Poirot novel originally published in the States in 1948 (and in Britain that same year, but under a different title: Taken at the Flood). The cover art is credited to Harvey Kidder. Below is the cover from what is said to be the 1972 Pocket edition of Endless Night, a standalone work first released in the UK in 1967. The cover painting was done by Tom Adams, who is famous for having produced the art for many Christie fronts over the years. To learn more about Dame Agatha Christie and her fiction, check out this excellent piece in Nick Fuller’s blog, The Grandest Game in the World.
READ MORE: “Agatha Christie: Hardboiled Philosopher” (CrimeReads).
1 comment:
Agatha Christie was my introduction to crime fiction. I can still remember the school book fair I attended when I was 10 or 11, where I spent some of my saved birthday money on The Body In The Library - all thanks to the cover. It was syringe filled with blood and tied in a knot. If someone had told me it was about a little old lady who did a lot of knitting, I would have steered clear and bought another Target Doctor Who novel but the cover did its job and I never looked back. It's sad to see how dull so many of her book covers are today, when so many that came before were bold and imaginative - I might not have discovered her otherwise.
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