Lord Edgware Dies

Lord Edgware Dies came out in Britain in September 1933, and in America the same year under the title Thirteen at Dinner; before that it had been serialised in an American magazine as 13 For Dinner, and it was well received on both sides of the Atlantic.

The novel brings together three of Christie's regulars, Poirot, Captain Hastings and Chief Inspector Japp. An American actress who is married to Lord Edgware asks Poirot to help her get a divorce, and he agrees to look into it and meets her husband.

That evening, the actress appears at a dinner at which thirteen people are sitting, a number with its own superstition attached to it. By the following morning Lord Edgware has been found murdered at his house and another American actress has been killed at hers, and Poirot has to work out how the two deaths are connected, given that the woman he met the previous day cannot have been in two places at once. The novel was among those adapted for television in the long series of Poirot films.