Easy To Kill

New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1939. First U.S. edition. Hardcover. This is a jacketed first printing of the first American edition. This example is very good plus in a very good dust jacket. The blue cloth binding is tight, clean, and unfaded, with sharp corners. The spine shows only mild wear to the ends and faint vertical creasing. The contents are crisp, bright, and clean with no spotting and no discernible age toning. The text block edges, including the untrimmed fore edges, are likewise exceptionally clean. The blue-stained top edges are lightly faded. The sole previous ownership mark is a contemporary name, British Columbia address, and date of “Jan. 6th. 1940” inked on the front free endpaper recto. The scarce dust jacket is clean and bright, despite light wear to extremities, flap folds, and joints, tiny loss to the spine ends and flap fold corners, and a three-inch closed tear to the lower front joint. The upper front flap is neatly price-clipped. The dust jacket is protected beneath a clear, removable, archival cover.

From the dust jacket front flap: "Only one woman in this quiet English village scented murder. "It's very easy to kill," she told Luke Fitzwilliam, "if no one suspects you." But before she could name the killer, she, too, was struck down. And Luke, just back from police duty in the Straits Settlements, found himself facing a new kind of menace. "Accidental death," the coroner called it, when Amy Gibbs drank poison by mistake, Harry Carter slipped off the footbridge, and Dr. Humbleby died of an infection. But Luke had been a policeman too long to accept such a gruesome array of coincidence without wondering. When his curiosity got the better of him, and he undertook a private investigation, he expected to turn up something; but before the case was closed, he had unearthed more than even his most extravagant suspicions had warranted."

Dame Agatha Christie (1890-1976) is the best-selling novelist of all time, most well known for her works of mystery featuring detectives Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple. Born to a wealthy family in Devon, Agatha Christie spent her happy childhood within the pages of books, having taught herself to read at an early age. Following her father’s death she was sent to a finishing school in Paris. Upon her return to England in 1910 she found her mother ill so they set off to the warmer climate of Cairo for her recovery. This first experience in Egypt was a formative one for the future writer; archaeology, Egyptology, and the Middle East would serve as settings for many of her most famous works. Though Christie was writing through the 1910s and had a number of short stories published under pseudonyms, it would be a decade before her first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, was published.

Agatha Christie was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1956 in honor of her contribution to British literature. Today Christie’s titles have sold over two billion copies, placing her behind only Shakespeare and the Bible in sales. Her play The Mousetrap has the longest continual initial run of any play, having been performed continuously in London’s West End since its opening in 1952.