Slice of P.I.: “Hickory Dickory Death”

(Part of a series celebrating fictional private eyes.)



Hickory Dickory Death, by Agatha Christie (Pocket, 1975).

Published originally in Great Britain at the end of October 1955 as Hickory Dickory Dock, this novel’s title was changed when it reached print in the United States a month later. Wikipedia’s description of the story’s plot will serve our needs quite well here:

It features her Belgian detective Hercule Poirot. The novel is notable for featuring Poirot's efficient secretary, Miss Felicity Lemon, who had previously appeared only in the Poirot short stories. This novel is set at a student hostel on Hickory Road, where Miss Lemon’s sister Mrs. Hubbard is the warden. Poirot attempts to discover the reason for a sudden spate of petty thefts and vandalism, as he suspects there is a darker aspect to the happenings at Hickory Road; these suspicions are confirmed when three people are murdered.

We are all familiar here, or should be, with the career of Christie’s mustachioed gentleman sleuth, who took up his first case in 1920’s The Mysterious Affair at Styles. Less familiar is the artist behind this novel’s 1975 cover. As Curtis Evans explains in his blog, The Passing Tramp, “Mara McAfee, who was born in 1929 and died much too young in 1984, got her start as a film and television actress and dancer in the 1950s. Often she was uncredited in her films, as in the landmark brutal Fifties noir Kiss Me Deadly, where she plays the beatific, silent nurse looking down upon the stricken Mike Hammer. She also had parts in the genre films Women’s Prison—starring Ida Lupino, Jan Sterling, Audrey Totter and Phyllis Thaxter (Wow!)—and Las Vegas Shakedown (she actually gets credited in that one), both also from ’55.”

While she was certainly attractive, McAfee didn’t trust that her fame would grow or endure in Hollywood, so she took her money earned from acting and dancing, and spent it on an art education. In 1962 she began exhibiting work in New York City, her paintings featuring familiar U.S. heroes, burlesque performers, comic-book characters, and more. However, she made a far bigger name for herself when she moved into magazines and books. McAfee started illustrating for the humor mag National Lampoon in the 1970s (her efforts later collected in book form), and was tasked at the same time by Pocket Books with creating new fronts for its line of Christie titles. I’m uncertain how many she created, but I hope to collect them all for Killer Covers.