First edition. Orange cloth lettered in black. Author's presentation copy, inscribed on publication, on the front endpaper to Christie's husband, Max Mallowan, "Max from Agatha / Jan 1943" with a small later gift sticker, inscribed by Christie to her housekeeper, Phyllis Rice, "Mrs Rice [From] Agatha Mallowan" A very good copy, the spine a little faded and a patch of fading to the upper cover where Christie had stuck the gift label to Mrs Rice.

An exceptional association copy, inscribed by Christie to unquestionably the most important man in her life. Christie met Max Mallowan in 1929 through their mutual friends, Leonard and Katherine Woolley, at a dig in Ur. Following a whirlwind romance, and despite the difference in age (Christie was 40, Mallowan 26) they were married in 1930. Throughout the thirties, every autumn and spring Christie would accompany Mallowan to the middle east on archaeological expeditions. Christie served as the official photographer, developing prints herself in makeshift darkrooms. She also discovered she had a gift for restoring pottery, piecing together fragments thousands of years old with infinite In between helping her husband she wrote some of her best known novels on these expeditions.
During the War Mallowan worked with this friend Stephen Glanville (and dedicatee of Five Little Pigs) at the Air Ministry. After the War Mallowan remained in archaeology as an academic and he and Christie split their time between Greenway in Devon (purchased in 1938) and Winterbrook House (purchased in 1934) in Wallingford. In her autobiography, Christie described their marriage as "like parallel railway tracks—each needing the other near, never converging.", whist Mallowan in his memoirs wrote, "Few men know what it is to live in harmony beside an imaginative, creative mind which inspires life with zest."

PROVENANCE: Sir Max Mallowan (Archaeologist and from 1930, the second husband of Agatha Christie); Phyllis Rice (Housekeeper at Greenway House from 1969); Family descent.

Stock ID: 46741