Hello crime readers and food lovers! Today we are Dining not only with Dame Agatha but also with Vincent Price. What a combo!! And it’s not the first time these two have met either. But more about that later. On the menu is Sole au Vermouth from Vincent Price’s A Treasury of Great Recipes. And top of our reading list is Lord Edgware Dies. This is another absolute cracker of a novel. I thoroughly enjoyed it. Lord Edgware Dies is a novel, where if you pay close attention and you know some Christie tropes you can, I think, quite easily figure out whodunnit it. I won’t mention the specific trope here because spoilers but let’s just say that people of a certain profession are quite often the villains in the novels so far!
Lord Edgware Dies – The Plot
Jane Wilkinson aka Lady Edgware wants a divorce. She asks Poirot to speak to her husband about granting her one. Although reluctant to do so, Poirot speaks to Lord Edgware, only to find that he says he has already agreed to a divorce. Then…wait for it….Lord Edgware dies (quelle surprise!). He is murdered in his home. His butler and housekeeper claim that Lady Edgware was the last person to see him alive as she visited the house that evening. However, 12 people swear to her having been at a dinner party with them at the time of the murder.
It is up to my beloved trinity of Hastings, Japp but mostly Poirot to figure out who did him in!
On top of a dead Lord we also have :
- An actress who died from an overdose of veronal
- A mysterious gold case
- A dead actor
- Altered letters
- A mysterious American widow
- An impoverished nephew who stands to inherit the Lord’s considerable wealth
Lord Edgware Dies – The Covers
Finding non-English Christie covers has become quite an obsession of mine. Here we have a Farsi version, a Russian edition, two French versions, and another possibly Eastern European edition. Dead centre is the Tom Adams version which eschews the normal symbolism for a pretty graphic knife in the head. It is not a corn knife, which was the murder weapon in Lord Edgware Dies but in “Tom Adams Uncovered” Tom Adam says that it was “nice little paper-knife of mine”. He also says he thinks Agatha Christie was not happy with the cover.
It is also definitely of a piece with Adams’ illustration for The Murder of Roger Ackroyd:
The Recipe – Sole au Vermouth
‘We will dine first Hastings. And until we drink our coffee, we will not discuss the case further. When engaged in eating, the brain should be the servant of the stomach.”
Poirot was as good as his word. We went to a litlte restaurant in Soho where he was well known, and there we had a delicious omelette, a sole, a chicken and a Baba au Rhum of which Poirot was inordinaltey fond”
Agatha Christie, Lord Edgware Dies
Disclaimer, we do not have sole in Australia so I cooked flathead. It tasted lovely and I very much liked VP’s idea of browning the sauce.
Other Food Mentioned in Lord Edgware Dies
Champagne, cocktails and old brandy in an immense goblet
Coffee (twice)
The ever present Whisky Soda (twice)
An omeltte (three times)
A chicken
A Baba au Rhum – I was tempted to make one of these but given I have already made a Savarin of Rum which is very similar I felt I would hold off. Given Poirot is said to be fond of them, I’m sure I will have another opportunity.
Next chronologically in the Christie canon is 1934’s Three Act Tragedy. But we may be skipping that one for the moment as we have a very special Christie collab coming up…stay tuned!
Have a great week, and for another great collab, here is something else combining Vincent Price and Agatha Christie.
