1933: Lord Edgware Dies / Thirteen at Dinner 

Publisher: William Collins & Sons, 1933 (UK);  Dodd, Mead & Co, 1933 (US)    

Series: Hercule Poirot

Category: Novel

Cross refs: Peril at End House; Cards on the Table; The Mysterious Mr Quin; The Murder of Roger Ackroyd

Warning, spoilers!

Re-reading Agatha Christie’s books in the order in which they were written has served to highlight the parallels between Lord Edgware Dies and Peril at End House (1932), in that in both novels the central female character entreats Poirot to solve their case, and this becomes their undoing. While these novels feel very different, this central tenet is all the more stark on reading them (almost) back-to-back. It puts me in mind of an extract from one of Christie’s later novels, Cards on the Table (1936), where Mrs Ariadne Oliver – a character often regarded as being based on Christie herself – observes:

I’ve written thirty-two books by now – and of course they’re all exactly the same really, as Monsieur Poirot seems to have noticed – but nobody else has …

But we are getting ahead of ourselves. For now, let us return to 1931. Christie, having met the 26-year-old British archaeologist Max Mallowan during a trip to the Middle East in early 1930, is now back in Iraq as Mallowan’s wife. Having travelled by boat, train and Orient Express (nota bene), to get there, she finds herself once again writing, as Max works at the mound of Nineveh – an ancient Near Eastern city of Upper Mesopotamia, located in the modern-day city of Mosul in northern Iraq. It was here that the first draft of Lord Edgeware Dies was written, though Christie had to fight for her right to have a sturdy desk from which to work during the trip. Reginald Campbell Thompson (or ‘C.T.’ as she refers to him in her autobiography), who they were on the dig with, couldn’t understand her wanting to spend money on something he deemed a luxury. Still, Christie made her case:

Writing books, I pointed out, was my work, and I had to have certain tools for it: a typewriter, a pencil, and a table at which I could sit … I insisted on having a solid table, not a mere affair of four legs and a top that rocked when you touched it, so the table cost £10 – an unheard-of sum. I think it took him quite a fortnight to forgive me for this luxurious extravagance.[1]  

While written during her time in Iraq, the seeds for Lord Edgeware Dies had already been sewn during a trip to the theatre back in the UK. The character of Carlotta Adams, around whom the plot (or at least the possibility of murder) revolves, was based on the American character-actress Ruth Draper (1884–1956). In her autobiography, Christie wrote:  

I had another idea that came to me after going to a performance of Ruth Draper. I thought how clever she was and how good her impersonations were; the wonderful way she could transform herself from a nagging wife to a peasant girl kneeling in a cathedral. Thinking about her led me to the book Lord Edgware Dies.[2]

A similar character to Adams – Aspasia Glen, the ‘Woman with the Scarf’ – featured in The Mysterious Mr Quin (1930), though the personality of Glen was significantly less sympathetic. In the present book, the more vacuous, self-absorbed elements of Glen’s character are transferred to the actress Jane Wilkinson, while Carlotta Adams is portrayed as being more self-effacing, a good listener and a good sister – necessary traits to make her death all the more tragic.   

Draper herself was known for her one-woman shows, in which she portrayed a panoply of original characters using only minimal props – a chair, shawl and table. As Morton Dauwen Zabel wrote in The Art of Ruth Draper: Her Dramas and Characters (1960):

She travelled through six continents and over thousands of miles by land, sea, and air without retinue, staff, or company, carrying all the equipment she needed in a few dress-cases or hat-boxes and the most rudimentary of make-up kits.[3]

Performing professionally from the early 1900s to 1956, Draper enchanted audiences worldwide, casting a spell via her ‘many assets of charm, imagination, ingenuity, physical energy, technical skill and invention’, as well as a kind of ‘sorcery … in illusion’.[4] Draper was praised by theatre luminaries, notably by the Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) and actor-director Laurence Olivier (1907–1989), as well as by fellow actors, including Katharine Hepburn (1907–2003), who declared, ‘My God, how brilliant she was!’[5] She appeared not only on the stage but also at society parties, including for Queen Mary (1867–1953) and Margot Asquith (1864–1945). The artist John Singer Sargent (1856–1925) also made several sketches of her (fig. 1).[6]

As with Peril at End House, Lord Edgware Dies abounds in moments of misdirection, and Poirot himself admits to having had the ‘cotton-wool’ pulled over his eyes. In the opening chapter, Hastings observes that Poirot had always regarded this case as one of his failures, since it was only the chance remark of a person in the street that put him on the right track. In a further move to put her readers off the scent, Christie presents a false ending, in which Poirot logically explains how the crimes could have been performed by another actor – complete with motive and opportunity. This is followed by Poirot’s usual blow-by-blow elucidation of what actually happened. As with The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Christie allows the murderer a final moment to explain herself and boast her cleverness. Yet, this is tinged with the lament:     

And if it hadn’t been for me, you never would have had anything to do with the case. I never thought you’d be so horribly clever.

Before its publication as a novel, the story was serialised in The American Magazine between March and August 1933 under the title 13 For Dinner. The American edition was similarly called Thirteen at Dinner – a title based on the superstition that if 13 people gather at a table for a meal, one of them will be dead within the year. Specifically, in the case of this book, bad luck is deemed to fall on the person who rises from the table first. Though the true genesis of this superstition is unclear, two origin stories are often cited:

First, there is the Last Supper, where Jesus ate with his 12 disciples and the thirteenth man in the room betrayed him. Then there is the Norse legend of the 12 gods invited to a banquet in Valhalla. The party is crashed by Loki, the spirit of strife and mystery, and Balder, the favourite of the gods, is killed.[7]

In Lord Edgware Dies, the superstition is mentioned by the actor Donald Ross, who attended the dinner party that provided Jane Wilkinson with her alibi for the murder of her husband. Though fourteen people had been invited, one person cancelled at the last minute, and Ross was the first to leave the table. When he is murdered later in the novel, Hastings expresses an uneasiness of the superstition being realised.

This is not the only self-referential moment in the book. The title of the English edition is also name checked by Ronald Marsh during his interview:

And that same evening – that very same evening – Lord Edgeware dies. Good title that, by the way. Lord Edgeware Dies. Look well on a bookstall.  

And of course, it did look well on a bookstall. The novel was positively received on publication, praised for presenting a ‘most ingenious crime puzzle and a still more ingenious solution, all set forth with the consummate skill of which Agatha Christie is mistress’.[8]

[1] Christie, 2011, p. 455.

[2] Christie 2011, p. 437.

[3] Morton Dauwen Zabel, The Art of Ruth Draper: Her Dramas and Characters (Doubleday & Company, 1960), p. 8.

[4] Ibid., p. 6.

[5] Susan Mulcahy, ‘Biography’, Ruth Draper Monologues, n.d., https://www.ruthdraper.com/about-ruth-draper/biography/ [accessed 24 September 2026].

[6] Brad Bigelow, ‘The Letters of Ruth Draper: A Self-Portrait of a Great Actress (1979)’, The Neglected Books Page, 5 December 2015, https://neglectedbooks.com/?p=3755 [accessed 2 February 2026].

[7] Julian Baggini, ‘The Friday the 13th Effect: Why So Many Restaurants are Missing a Table 13’, Guardian, 11 July 2012.

[8] The New York Times Book Review, 24 September 1933.