At last! At last! Gracia's brand new zine A Catalogue of Bodies, which was available for pre-order last week, is preparing to wing its way to new homes near and far. Thank-you for your recent orders. Your orders, alongside the remainder of the edition of 50, are spending the day drying under weight. Behind me as I draw, a tower of zines with blood-red spines.
You, too, can pick up a copy for yourself here through our online store.
At 77 double-sided pages in length, this is the biggest zine we've assembled to date, and it comes with that fetching blood-red spine I mentioned. Inside, it is filled with a host of bodies from every Agatha Christie Hercule Poirot tale starring David Suchet. It even features said beloved Belgium sleuth in a couple of screen-grabs. Expect to find bodies gathered from Evil Under the Sun, Death on the Nile, Murder in Mesopotamia, The Hollow, and the short stories too. No body has been left out. Name, Cause of Death, and Time of Death have all been slavishly recorded by G. It is quite the homage to Poirot's particularity and neatness. Many right angles and most methodical.
Enjoy it, friends.
A Catalogue of Bodies harvested from the
television adaptations (1989-2014) of Agatha Christie’s stories
featuring Hercule Poirot as played by David Suchet. Included in this
grisly catalogue, pretend deaths (such as Magdala ‘Nick’ Buckley’s
staged overdose in Peril at End House and Norma Restarick’s staged suicide in the bathtub in The Third Girl, and what appears to be Arlena Stuart’s strangled body on the beach but is actually Christine Redfern in disguise in Evil Under the Sun),
suicides, deaths, and murders. In some cases, where the body is not
shown, the moment just prior features, giving us Dorothy Craddock,
having been earlier injected with bacteria, falling ill in Egypt in Cards on the Table; Rosaleen and Gordon Cloade just before the bomb blast in Taken at the Flood; Major Richard Knighton shown standing on the train tracks at mystery’s culmination in The Blue Train;
and because both were simply too good not to include, on a newspaper in
Hastings’ hands, a headline announcing Felix Bleibner’s mysterious
death in The Egyptian Tomb, and Lady Muriel in the play attended by Poirot and Arthur Hastings in The Third Floor Flat.
Whilst several pretend deaths have been included, any thwarted
attempts and near misses have been left out of the catalogue as they did
not produce an actual body to document. For example, Nurse Hopkins’
thwarted attempt to poison Poirot (Sad Cypress), Mrs Rendell’s failed attempt to push Poirot before a train (Mrs McGinty’s Dead), Miss Phyllida Campion being “pushed down the moving stairs” (The Case of the Missing Will),
and in order to throw suspicion onto others, Miss Gilchrist’s illness
as a result of consuming a non-fatal, self-poisoned piece of wedding
cake (After the Funeral). Deaths referred to in conversation
only, such as Richard Abernethie from After the Funeral, have also not
been included in this catalogue.
Next up, Miss Marple? I do hope so.
(How a zine is made.)
(The line 'Hastings, I have had in mind all along a certain idea' comes from Agatha Christie's Lord Edgware Dies.)
