One, Two, Buckle My Shoe

The Collins Crime Club published One, Two, Buckle My Shoe in November 1940, and Dodd, Mead brought it out in the United States in February 1941 as The Patriotic Murders. A later American paperback edition changed the title again, to An Overdose of Death.

The book features both Hercule Poirot and Chief Inspector Japp, and it is the last of the Poirot novels in which Japp appears. The case begins with a visit to the dentist, who is found dead soon afterwards, and the novel spreads out from there to take in several other deaths that turn out to be connected to the first.

Reviews at the time of publication were mixed; some critics thought the narrative unusually compact and its plot neatly concealed, while others found less to admire in it than in the stronger Poirot books. It sits in the middle of a run of novels Christie wrote during the war, and it is usually read as one of the titles in which her interest in the machinery of a puzzle is most plainly on show.