'The Murder on the Links, The Companion Edition' Presents Poirot's Second Case in the Original 1923 Text, Collated Against the Early Printings, with Eight Readings Restored

Overview

NEW YORK, Oct. 30, 2026, In March 1923, Dodd, Mead and Company of New York published a detective novel by a thirty-two-year-old English writer who had exactly two books behind her. The Murder on the Links was Agatha Christie's third book and her detective's second case: Hercule Poirot, the Belgian ex-policeman who had debuted in The Mysterious Affair at Styles in 1920, is summoned to France by a millionaire who fears for his life, and arrives to find his client stabbed in a newly dug grave on the golf links beside his villa. The Bodley Head published the London edition two months later. A new Companion Classics edition, The Murder on the Links, The Companion Edition, presents the complete novel, 64,340 words, unabridged, in the text of that 1923 first publication, taken from Project Gutenberg eBook #58866 and collated against the Standard Ebooks proofread text and a photographic scan of the Dell reprint of the Dodd, Mead text held by the Internet Archive. Eight readings are restored where both collation partners agree against the Gutenberg file, seven words the file drops and one mis-accented French word, and the readings where the witnesses split, among them the period spellings "Buenos Ayres" and "Chilians", are kept from the base text and recorded in the edition's provenance note.

The Case

The case itself is two cases wearing one coat. Paul Renauld, who made his fortune in South America and had settled at the Villa Geneviève in the Channel resort of Merlinville-sur-Mer only weeks before, is found in a half-dug bunker grave, wearing his son's overcoat, a love letter signed "Bella" in its pocket. His wife Eloise tells of two masked strangers in the night. And France sends its champion: Giraud of the Paris Sûreté, the great man of footprints, cigarette ash, and the magnifying glass, against whom Poirot sets nothing but his little grey cells and an inconvenient memory for a Paris crime of twenty-two years before, the Beroldy case, which he insists on recounting at full length in the middle of the investigation. Before the book ends there is a second body, an arrest, and a wager of five hundred francs. The edition's companion material is spoiler-fenced throughout: the culprit and the second-crime twists are not named anywhere in it until the final discussion set.

Companion Material

Around the novel, the companion material, all of it original to this edition, includes an introduction on Christie in 1923, the serialisation in The Grand Magazine under her discarded title The Girl with Anxious Eyes, and the making of Poirot as a series detective; a Who's Who of the Villa Geneviève and Merlinville; four explainers, covering the French setting, the Sûreté, and the two ways of detecting the novel sets against each other; crossing to France in 1923 by boat train, telegram, and motor car; money and customs in francs and pounds; and the golf links themselves as the scene of the crime; a short life of Agatha Christie; an honest note on the period text; a reading schedule; an appendix on Poirot's second case and the detective as he stood in 1923; and thirty-six discussion questions in four spoiler-fenced meetings plus a whole-book set.

Book Club Kit

Alongside the book, The Murder on the Links, Book Club Kit offers the edition's discussion material as a printable PDF (29 pages, US Letter) for reading groups: the four-meeting plan, the Who's Who and explainers, a chapter map with the edition's own word counts, all thirty-six questions arranged by meeting, and the kit's signature activity, The Clue Timeline, a clue log and case timeline worksheet that a group completes as it reads, with its "what it meant" column deliberately left blank until the final meeting; the kit carries no answer key, so nothing in it can spoil the book. The kit is available for $7 through the editor's Payhip store: https://payhip.com/horaceharriottjr

Availability

The Murder on the Links, The Companion Edition is available now as an eBook ($9.99) through Payhip: https://payhip.com/horaceharriottjr, and in The Classics and Companions Shop on the editor's Linktree. Print editions follow on Amazon (paperback, $14.99; hardcover, $24.99; Kindle, $9.99). The novel's text is public domain in the United States (first published in New York in 1923; Agatha Christie died in 1976, so the novel remains in copyright in life-plus-seventy countries, and this edition is published for the United States first, with no non-US marketplace plans).

About the Editor

Horace Harriott Jr. is a New York-based author and editor of more than two dozen books, including The Side Hustle Handbook, Master Playbook and The Ultimate Commissary Cookbook. This edition is part of his Companion Classics series of reading-together editions of public-domain classics.

About the Book

The Murder on the Links, The Companion Edition, Agatha Christie (author), Horace Harriott Jr. (editor). Companion Classics, independently published, October 2026. Text: the first edition (Dodd, Mead and Company, New York, March 1923; The Bodley Head, London, May 1923), via Project Gutenberg eBook #58866, collated against the Standard Ebooks proofread text and a photographic scan of the Dell reprint of the Dodd, Mead text; eight readings restored; 28 chapters; 64,340 words; interior proof 327 pages, 6 x 9 in.