I must say it's been nice to see a bit of the world-though England for me every time, thank you. Well, dear, I think that's really all my news. Her fountain pen drove briskly over the paper. In the hall of the Tigris Palace Hotel in Baghdad a hospital nurse was finishing a letter.

It is intended to be in the nature of a frontispiece-that is, it gives a rough sketch of the narrator. The only thing I have done is to take the liberty of writing a first chapter-aided by a letter kindly supplied by one of Miss Leatheran's friends. At one moment she is, so to speak, 'remembering her manners' (and hospital nurses are great sticklers for etiquette) and at the next her interest in what she is telling is that of a pure human being-cap and cuffs forgotten! If she calls Hercule Poirot 'Poirot' in one paragraph and 'Mr. Poirot' in the next, such a variation is both interesting and suggestive. Miss Leatheran's style in my opinion is vigorous, individual and entirely apposite. She hoped I would 'put the grammar right and all that.' I have, on the contrary, refused to alter so much as a single word. I soon disposed of that, assuring her that as children criticize their parents freely in print nowadays, parents are only too delighted when their offspring come in for their share of abuse! Her other objection was extreme modesty about her literary style. I discovered that this was partly due to some critical remarks she had made concerning my daughter Sheila. It was not very easy to persuade Miss Leatheran to undertake this task-in fact, persuading her was one of the hardest jobs of my professional career-and even after it was completed she displayed a curious reluctance to let me see the manuscript.

She had a professional character of the highest, she is not biased by having any previous connection with the University of Pittstown Expedition to Iraq and she was an observant and intellectual eyewitness. I therefore suggested to Miss Amy Leatheran that she should undertake the task. Those misconstructions have appeared more especially in the American Press.įor obvious reasons it was desirable that the account should not come from the pen of one of the expedition staff, who might reasonably be supposed to be prejudiced. There have been the wildest and most ridiculous rumours suggesting that important evidence was suppressed and other nonsense of that kind. Circumstances have rendered it necessary, in my opinion, that a straightforward account of them should be given to the public. The events chronicled in this narrative took place some four years ago.

Murder in mesopotamia