Bestseller … Agatha Christie's Poirot Investigates from 1924 reaches £40,630 at auction. Photograph: D Winter Auctioneers
A rare early dust-jacket drawing of Agatha Christie's fictional detective Hercule Poirot has driven the price of a book that originally sold for 37p to a record £40,630.
The first edition of Christie's short story collection Poirot Investigates, from 1924, was put up for auction by the Dominic Winter auction house with a guide price of £3,000 to £5,000. After a fierce bidding war, a book that was priced on publication at just seven shillings and sixpence eventually sold for £40,630 to book dealer Christian Jonkers from Jonkers Rare Books. Dominic Winter believes this is the highest price ever paid for a Christie book: the most expensive previously sold is thought to be a £10,000 copy of The Mysterious Affair at Styles, auctioned at Sotheby's in 2009.
The 1924 edition's dust jacket is the first to show the Belgian detective, depicting a smartly dressed man, shoes polished, cane in one hand, hat and gloves in the other. Just as Christie described him in her debut, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, "his head was exactly the shape of an egg, and he always perched it a little on one side. His moustache was very stiff and military", and "the neatness of his attire was almost incredible; I believe a speck of dust would have caused him more pain than a bullet wound."
Dominic Winter auctioneer Chris Albury said the book was of particular interest to collectors because "it's the first representation of Poirot on a dust jacket, which is partly why the price went so high".
"The dust jacket is the key," Albury said. "It's pretty perfect, and usually dust jackets from this time have got a panel or half a panel missing. Here Poirot is completely intact … Pre-second-world-war dust jackets are far less common than postwar ones, too – they were often taken off books at the point of sale and put in bins, so they didn't even make it out of shops."
Poirot Investigates is Christie's first collection of short stories to feature Poirot and his sidekick Captain Hastings. It sees the duo tackling mysteries including the abduction of a prime minister and the case of a film star and a diamond. The Times Literary Supplement of April 1924 was positive about the collection. "When in the first of M Poirot's adventures we find a famous diamond that has once been the eye of a god and a cryptic message that it will be taken from its possessor 'at the full of the moon', we are inclined to grow indignant on behalf of our dear old friend the moonstone [in Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone]. But we have no right to do so, for the story is quite original," ran the review. "Moreover, if Captain Hastings, who tells the story, is a little like Watson, always anxious to display his cleverness and always getting snubbed, every detective has had a foil since the days of Lecoq. In fact M Poirot is a thoroughly pleasant and entertaining person, an admirable companion for a railway journey."
Christie went on to write 80 crime novels and short story collections and 19 plays, with a further six novels published under the name Mary Westmacott. The author, whose books have sold more than 2bn copies worldwide, died in 1976
The first edition of Christie's short story collection Poirot Investigates, from 1924, was put up for auction by the Dominic Winter auction house with a guide price of £3,000 to £5,000. After a fierce bidding war, a book that was priced on publication at just seven shillings and sixpence eventually sold for £40,630 to book dealer Christian Jonkers from Jonkers Rare Books. Dominic Winter believes this is the highest price ever paid for a Christie book: the most expensive previously sold is thought to be a £10,000 copy of The Mysterious Affair at Styles, auctioned at Sotheby's in 2009.
The 1924 edition's dust jacket is the first to show the Belgian detective, depicting a smartly dressed man, shoes polished, cane in one hand, hat and gloves in the other. Just as Christie described him in her debut, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, "his head was exactly the shape of an egg, and he always perched it a little on one side. His moustache was very stiff and military", and "the neatness of his attire was almost incredible; I believe a speck of dust would have caused him more pain than a bullet wound."
Dominic Winter auctioneer Chris Albury said the book was of particular interest to collectors because "it's the first representation of Poirot on a dust jacket, which is partly why the price went so high".
"The dust jacket is the key," Albury said. "It's pretty perfect, and usually dust jackets from this time have got a panel or half a panel missing. Here Poirot is completely intact … Pre-second-world-war dust jackets are far less common than postwar ones, too – they were often taken off books at the point of sale and put in bins, so they didn't even make it out of shops."
Poirot Investigates is Christie's first collection of short stories to feature Poirot and his sidekick Captain Hastings. It sees the duo tackling mysteries including the abduction of a prime minister and the case of a film star and a diamond. The Times Literary Supplement of April 1924 was positive about the collection. "When in the first of M Poirot's adventures we find a famous diamond that has once been the eye of a god and a cryptic message that it will be taken from its possessor 'at the full of the moon', we are inclined to grow indignant on behalf of our dear old friend the moonstone [in Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone]. But we have no right to do so, for the story is quite original," ran the review. "Moreover, if Captain Hastings, who tells the story, is a little like Watson, always anxious to display his cleverness and always getting snubbed, every detective has had a foil since the days of Lecoq. In fact M Poirot is a thoroughly pleasant and entertaining person, an admirable companion for a railway journey."
Christie went on to write 80 crime novels and short story collections and 19 plays, with a further six novels published under the name Mary Westmacott. The author, whose books have sold more than 2bn copies worldwide, died in 1976
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