Death Comes As The End

London: Collins, 1945. First edition, first printing. Published by Collins, London, in 1945. This is a very good copy. The dust wrapper has chipping to the spine tips and to the corners - mostly to the bottom of the spine. It has not been price clipped and shows 7s 6d. The internal pages are generally clean and with a neat name the top of the front endpaper. The boards are free from notable chips and marks and are generally clean with a little off-setting married to the chipping evident on the dust wrapper. The text blocks are bright and white throughout and free from foxing. This is a very good copy of a fine, rare title. It is the only one of Christie's novels not to be set in the 20th century, and - unusually for her - also features no European characters. Instead, the novel is set in Thebes in 2000 BC, a setting for which Christie gained an appreciation whilst working with her archaeologist husband, Sir Max Mallowan, in the Middle East. The novel is notable for its very high number of deaths and is comparable to And Then There Were None from this standpoint. It is also the first full-length novel combining historical fiction and the whodunit/detective story, a genre which would later come to be called the historical whodunit.