Hercule Poirot's Christmas by Agatha Christie First Edition The Crime Club Collins 1939. A fine copy with one small neat contemporary date inscription to corner of ffep. Some light sporadic foxing to preliminary pages (only). Covers are bright and have no bumping to corners or fading to spine. In original near fine price clipped dust jacket with some archival restoration chiefly to spine tips. An excellent copy.

On a snowy Christmas Eve in the opulent yet oppressive Gorston Hall, tyrannical patriarch Simeon Lee summons his fractious brood—resentful sons, a scheming daughter-in-law, a fiery Spanish granddaughter, and a mysterious newcomer—for a familial reckoning laced with threats of disinheritance. Amid yuletide cheer and simmering grudges, Lee is savagely murdered in his locked study, throat slit in a crimson tableau that shatters the holiday idyll. Hercule Poirot, summoned by the local constabulary, deploys his inimitable little grey cells to dissect alibis, unearth buried scandals, and unmask the killer among the poisoned eggnog and festive facades, in Christie's signature brew of claustrophobic intrigue, psychological acuity, and festive-tinged treachery.

This Yuletide whodunit enchants readers with its masterful fusion of holiday warmth and homicidal chill, captivating cozy mystery lovers who savor Christie's intricate family dynamics and red-herring revels, akin to the seasonal sins in Ngaio Marsh's "Off with His Head" but with sharper Poirot panache. Collectors cherish it as a festive fixture in the Christie canon, embodying the Golden Age's cultural alchemy of domestic dread that birthed enduring tropes in locked-room lore and permeates annual armchair traditions. Its evergreen allure hooks both escapist revelers craving clever conundrums and genre scholars probing bourgeois brutality, bridging gleeful guesswork with incisive portraits of avarice's grip.

SOLD October 2025