'The Big Four (Detective Club Edition) (Harper Collins 2016 isbn 9780008165000) is a special edition published by HarperCollins in 2016 of Agatha Christie's short stories which went to form her novel The Big Four. This edition, part of HarperCollin's Detective Club series may be considered a different work from her novel of 1927 as it uses the original text from the series of short stories which she published in The Sketch in 1924. By contrast, what was published in 1927 is a novelisation based on the short stories and is somewhat longer.
Publisher's summary[]
"A special edition of Agatha Christie’s early Poirot adventure novel containing the original 12-part short story version “The Man Who Was Number Four”, unseen since 1924. The Big Four is the most formidable crime syndicate of all time. A sinister Chinaman, a multi-millionaire, a beautiful Frenchwoman and ‘The Destroyer’ are terrorising the world with their fiendish genius. Only Hercule Poirot’s sensational methods of deduction stand in their way of world domination, and after adventures as strange as the Arabian nights, Poirot runs them to earth at last in a cave in the Dolomites.
The astonishing success of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd put Agatha Christie under enormous pressure to deliver another Poirot book at a time of intense personal turmoil for the author. Suffering from writer’s block, and with the help of her brother-in-law, Campbell Christie, she reluctantly dug out The Man Who Was Number Four, a 12-week serial she had written for The Sketch three years before – long before Ackroyd – and began adapting it into a full-length novel. . .
This Detective Story Club classic is introduced by Agatha Christie historian Karl Pike, who has unearthed the 12 magazine stories from the British Library archives and presents here the original version of The Big Four, an adventurous serial novel full of incident and cliffhangers, unseen since 1924."[1]
Contents[]
| Short story | Original issue of Sketch and date |
|---|---|
| The Unexpected Guest | issue 1614, 2 January 1924 |
| The Adventure of the Dartmoor Bungalow | issue 1615, 9 January 1924 |
| The Lady on the Stairs | issue 1616, 16 January 1924 |
| The Radium Thieves | issue 1617, 23 January 1924 |
| In the House of the Enemy | issue 1618, 30 January 1924 |
| The Yellow Jasmine Mystery | issue 1619, 6 February 1924 |
| The Chess Problem | issue 1620, 13 February 1924 |
| The Baited Trap | issue 1621, 20 February 1924 |
| The Adventure of the Peroxide Blonde | issue 1622, 27 February 1924 |
| The Terrible Catastrophe | issue 1623, 5 March 1924 |
| The Dying Chinaman | issue 1624, 12 March 1924 |
| The Crag in the Dolomites | issue 1625, 19 March 1924 |