Page xi →The Mystery of Agatha Christie’s Titles

Many of Agatha Christie’s novels were originally published under two titles, one for British and the other for American audiences—an issue briefly addressed on p. 42 of this volume. In writing and researching this book, I relied on The Agatha Christie Mystery Collection, an edition published by Bantam in the 1980s and 1990s. This series employs the American titles of Christie’s books, and I have, for the most part, used these titles in the ensuing volume, despite that the Christie Estate has since standardized her titles to their original British publications. Any questions about the identity of a particular text mentioned in Understanding Agatha Christie can be resolved by consulting the bibliography, which includes all titles and their variants. The mystery remains, however, why anyone would pick 4:50 from Paddington as a preferable title to What Mrs. McGillicuddy Saw!—even if it were Agatha herself—or why someone once insisted that Death in the Clouds should be retitled Death in the Air, surely a distinction without much of a difference.