Inspiration for this quiz goes to Lucy Fisher in the Golden Age Detection Facebook group, who asked fellow members to guess which Christie title this cover was for:
Bit of a sneaky one as although it is for Why Didn’t They Ask Evans? (1934) the translation uses the American title The Boomerang Clue. So for my quiz I have scoured the internet for Christie covers in different languages and the name of the game is unsurprisingly to guess which titles the covers are for. An additional challenge is for you to also guess which language they are in.
So if you fancy a go add your answers to the comment section below. The answers will go up next week. Fancy another Christie cover quiz? Try this one I made from last year.
Cover 1
Cover 2
Cover 3
Cover 4
Cover 5
Cover 6
Cover 7
Cover 8
Cover 9
Cover 10
Cover 11
Cover 12
Cover 13
Cover 14
Cover 15
Cover 16
Cover 17
Cover 18
Cover 19
Finally there is cover picture. It is meant to be a Christie title translated into Urdu. Unfortunately though I can’t seem to find out which title it is meant to be, my Urdu is a little rusty. So if anyone with a smattering of Urdu can find out for me if it is a Christie and if so which one that would be great.
N. B. Update: As you can see in the comments section below Santosh has solved the mystery, though unfortunately it does mean this is not a Christie cover.
crossexaminingcrime 
3. French – The Man In The Brown Suit
4. German – Hickory, Dickory, Dock
7. German – Three Act Tragedy
8. Spanish – Murder At The Vicarage
9. Spanish – Three Blind Mice
13. Portuguese – Elephants Can Remember
17 Swedish or Norwegian perhaps – The Crooked House
18. Russian – Nemesis
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1. A Caribbean Mystery? Since the translation of the French title would be “The major talked a lot”
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2. French – The Clocks
10. Turkish – The Secret Adversary? (I’m going simply by the cover image here. Could that be Tommy and Tuppence?)
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Some loose translating, some frank guesses…
1: A Caribbean Maystery
2: The Clocks
3: The Man in the Brown Suit
4: Sad Cypress
6: Peril at End House
7: Sparkling Cyanide
8: Murder at the Vicarage
10: The Secret Adversary
13: Elephants Can Remember [a genuinely brilliant cover]
14: Battleship Head Lady and the Mystery of the Terrible Ear-Rings
19: One, Two, Buckle My Shoe
Nice idea, will be interested to see the answers!
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It’s quite embarrassing how long it took me to get The Clocks — the only Christie I could think of that had a clock featuring prominently was The Big Four; nope, the one with clocks in the title did not occur to me for a looooooong time…
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haha I so wish your version of number 14 was true!
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1 ACM
2 TSM
3 TMITBS
4 SC
5 SM
6 TH
7 TAT
8 TMATV
9 TBM
1O TSA
11 ATTWN
12 APFOR
13 ECR
14 DOTN
15 PAEH
16 TBITL
17 CH
18 N
19 OTBMS
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(CONTINUING)
The last one is the cover of Jonk Ki Wapsi (The Leech Returns) by the famous Urdu writer Ibn-e Safi.
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Hooray on the one hand that the mystery is solved but booo on the other hand that google lied to me and implied it was an Agatha Christie book. Oh well least I can sleep easy tonight. Glad I didn’t put it in the quiz now!
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5. Okay, this is a long shot, but this image reminds me of “Sleeping Murder”.
12. Equally dubious is my solution to this one: “A Pocket full of Rye” . Since the German title would be “Das Geheimnis der Amsel” (that black bird on the cover). Czech or Polish?
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Yes, the image of 5 gives a good hint.
For 12, the language is Polish
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Translating some of them provides a title that is so bland it’s of no help at all. As in #16 and #14. Here are my guesses, a combination of using Google translate, using the illustration as a clue, and my not so reliable memory bank:
Skipping over the French, Spanish and Russian titles I added the languages of those that are not so easily recognized.
1 “The Major Talked Too Much” is of no help to me. Neither is the emerald earring or the bloody stilletto.
2. The Clocks
3. The Man in the Brown Suit
4. Hickory, Dickory Death (first boring German title using a poison)
5. Sleeping Murder (Czech)
6. “Fatal Weekend” – this could be anything! How about The Hollow. The rifle crosshairs on the victim is all wrong if that’s correct. Are there any murders by rifle shot that occur over a weekend? (Finnish)
7. Three Act Tragedy/Murder in Three Acts (second boring German title using a poison)
8, Murder at the Vicarage
9. Three Blind Mice
10. The Secret Adversary (Turkish)
11. And Then There Were None – based on illustration alone (Finnish)
12. A Pocketful of Rye. This one I guessed before I translated it and I know it’s right. So proud of myself. (Polish)
13. Elephants Can Remember (Portuguese)
14. “She Followed” – could it be They Came to Bagdad? (Norwegian)
15. “Creeping Death” – The Moving Finger, maybe? Generic illustration is of no help (Norwegian)
16. “Death of a Dancer” – my guess is Sparkling Cyanide (Dutch)
17. Crooked House (Swedish)
18. Nemesis
19. One, Two, Buckle My Shoe – illustration is a big help
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Very fine effort. And I agree some of the titles choices such as cover 1 are a little on the prosaic side.
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John, you’re right, Kohtalokas viikonloppu (Fatal Weekend) is the Finnish translation of the Hollow. The picture does not help, though. It looks like a man who is being shot at on a golf course.
Eikä yksikään pelastunut is And Then There Were None, but here the illustration helps.
Is the first one A Caribbean Mystery?
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Hint for 2: The English translation of the French title is Five Hours Twenty Five. In which novel does the time 5.25 have significance ?
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Solid gold, I loved this quiz. and longing to read Battleship Head Lady and the Terrible Earrings.
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yes I know JJ so needs to write this book for us now.
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[…] where from translated editions. If you haven’t had a go already then head on over to the quiz first before reading any more of this […]
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[…] in 2017 I did the first Christie Cover Quiz, which you can access here. In that quiz I had searched the internet for various covers of Agatha Christie novels, but in […]
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