Murder in Mesopotamia

The Collins Crime Club published Murder in Mesopotamia on 6 July 1936, and Dodd, Mead brought it out in the United States later the same year. The British edition sold for seven shillings and sixpence and the American one for two dollars.

The novel takes place at an archaeological excavation in Iraq, and its descriptive detail comes out of Christie's own visits to the site of Ur, where she met her second husband, the archaeologist Max Mallowan, and the other British archaeologists working there with him.

Nurse Amy Leatheran arrives at the dig near Hassanieh to look after Louise, the wife of the Swedish-American archaeologist Dr Eric Leidner, who is thought to be suffering from her nerves. Poirot is drawn into the household after the killing that follows, and the book was adapted for television in 2002. Christie had been travelling out to Mesopotamia since 1930, when she went to visit the excavations at Ur, and although the dig in the novel is invented, the routine of the camp, the heat and the small enclosed society of the expedition are drawn from what she saw there.