Programming note: Tomorrow, Saturday, Mark will be back for his weekend music show Mark Steyn on the Town. It airs at 5pm British Summer Time - which is 6pm in Western Europe and - for this weekend only - an hour later than usual in North America: 1pm Eastern/10am Pacific. You can listen from almost anywhere on the planet by clicking the button at top right here. On Sunday, he will have a different kind of audio diversion, with Part Nine of the twentieth-anniversary serialisation of his highly prescient bestseller, America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It.
Meanwhile, welcome along to the seventy-fourth audio adventure in our series Tales for Our Time - and to our third offering from the world's bestselling novelist: The Murder on the Links by Agatha Christie. Because of his travels and his ill-health, Mark's introduction is a little shorter than usual, but it sets up Hercule Poirot, Captain Hastings, and the difference between this adventure and its predecessor. After the intro, we're on to the action and the first episode, with Hastings on the train from the Gare du Nord to Calais:
I believe that a well-known anecdote exists to the effect that a young writer, determined to make the commencement of his story forcible and original enough to catch and rivet the attention of the most blasé of editors, penned the following sentence:
" 'Hell!' said the Duchess."
Strangely enough, this tale of mine opens in much the same fashion. Only the lady who gave utterance to the exclamation was not a Duchess!
To hear Mark read the first part of The Murder on the Links, Steyn Club members should please click here and log-in.
We have all kinds of tales in our archives, from the leisurely comedy of Jerome K Jerome's Three Men in a Boat to P G Wodehouse with a social conscience in Psmith, Journalist - oh, and some fusty notions of honour and duty in a certain other fellow's The Prisoner of Windsor. Tales for Our Time in all its variety is both highly relevant and a welcome detox from the madness of the hour: over eight years' worth of Mark's audio adaptations of classic fiction starting with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's cracking tale of an early conflict between jihadists and westerners in The Tragedy of the Korosko. To access them all, please see our easy-to-navigate Netflix-style Tales for Our Time home page. We've introduced a similar tile format for Steyn's Sunday Poems and also for our Hundred Years Ago Show.
We launched The Mark Steyn Club over eight years ago, and we're overwhelmed by all those members across the globe who've signed up to be a part of it - from Fargo to Fiji, Vancouver to Vanuatu, Cook County to the Cook Islands, West Virginia to the West Midlands. As we said at the time, membership isn't for everyone, but it is a way of ensuring that all our content remains available for everyone.
That said, we are offering our Club members a few extras, including our monthly audio adventures by Dickens, Conrad, Kafka, Gogol, Louisa May Alcott, H G Wells, George Orwell, Baroness Orczy, Scott Fitzgerald, Robert Louis Stevenson - plus a couple of pieces of non-classic fiction by a certain niche Canadian. You can find them all here. We're very pleased by the response to our Tales - and we even do them live occasionally, and sometimes with special guests.
We're truly thrilled that one of the most popular of our Steyn Club extras these last eight-plus years has been our nightly radio serials. If you've enjoyed them and you're looking for a present for a fellow fan of classic fiction, we hope you'll consider our special Club Gift Membership. Aside from Tales for Our Time, The Mark Steyn Club does come with other benefits:
~Exclusive Steyn Store member pricing on over 40 books, mugs, T-shirts, and other products;
~The chance to engage in live Clubland Q&A sessions with yours truly, such as this Wednesday's;
~Transcript and audio versions of The Mark Steyn Show, Mark's Mailbox, and our other video content;
~Steyn's video series of classic poetry;
~Booking for special members-only events, such as The Mark Steyn Christmas Show, assuming such events are ever again lawful;
~Advance booking for Mark's live appearances around the world, assuming he's ever again healthy enough for "live appearances";
~Customised email alerts for new content in your areas of interest;
~and the opportunity to support our print, audio and video ventures as they wing their way around the planet.
To become a member of The Mark Steyn Club, please click here - and don't forget that special Gift Membership. As soon as you join, you'll get access not only to The Murder on the Links but to all the other yarns gathered together at the Tales for Our Time home page.
One other benefit to membership is our Comment Club privileges. So, if you think Mark's take on an enduring classic is as bumbling as Hastings, feel free to have at it.
And do join us tomorrow evening for Part Two of The Murder on the Links, and every night circa midnight Greenwich Mean Time thereafter.
