Dead Man's Folly

Dead Man's Folly is a mystery novel by the English writer Agatha Christie, first published in the United States by Dodd, Mead and Company in October 1956 and in Britain by the Collins Crime Club the following month.

The book brings together two of Christie's recurring characters: Hercule Poirot, the Belgian detective, and Ariadne Oliver, the crime novelist who appears in several of the later books as a friend and a source of cheerful complication. Mrs Oliver has designed a murder hunt as the attraction at a fete held at the Devon house of Sir George and Lady Stubbs, and small alterations to her scheme make her uneasy enough to send for Poirot. At the fete the game produces a real corpse, and the investigation has to establish how a staged puzzle became a killing without anyone noticing.

The novel belongs to the Poirot books of Christie's most productive period and takes its shape from the village setting, with the house, its grounds and the fete itself doing much of the work of the plot.