Original mysteryNo. 1511 hr 2 minHercule Poirot
Casablanca, 1930: a bomb explodes in the Marché Central among stalls of oranges, spices, and crowds of French officers, Moroccan merchants, and Spanish workmen — a man in a cream linen suit lies dead, a printed manifesto reading DEATH TO THE PROFITEERS is found scattered nearby, and the police say politics; but the Belgian Detective notices the blast was too small to be a political statement and too precise to be an accident, and as he and his loyal companion follow a woman in a blue dress who placed something in the dead man's pocket moments before the explosion, a clock stopped at eleven past ten, a glove too clean to have been worn, a scrap of silk too obvious to be honest, and a set of stolen financial papers that someone will kill again to recover, they uncover a murder disguised as history and a man who made terror his alibi; inspired by the real bombing of the Marché Central de Casablanca (1953) while remaining entirely fictional, The Bomb at the Marché Central is an original Golden Age–style mystery about colonial fear, public terror as private cover, and the discovery that the most dangerous disguise for murder is the one everyone already wants to believe.
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