Dumb Witness

The Collins Crime Club published Dumb Witness on 5 July 1937, and Dodd, Mead brought it out in the United States later the same year as Poirot Loses a Client. It was priced at seven shillings and sixpence in Britain and two dollars in America.

The book features Hercule Poirot, and it is told by his friend Arthur Hastings. It is the last of the Poirot novels in which Hastings appears until Curtain, published nearly forty years later, which he also narrates.

The case turns on the death of an elderly woman who had written to Poirot about a series of accidents, and on an accident that turns out to have been attempted murder, with the only witness being a dog. Reviews when the book appeared were generally favourable, though a number of them complained about the mechanics of the plot; one paper observed that the author did this sort of thing so superlatively well that readers would forgive her almost anything, and the book has stayed in print as one of the middle-period Poirot titles.