The Pale Horse is a work of detective fiction by British writer Agatha Christie, first published in the UK by the Collins Crime Club on 6 November 1961,[1] and in the US by Dodd, Mead and Company the following year.

Mark Easterbrook, the central character of the book and its principal narrator, sees a fight between two girls in a Chelsea coffee bar, during which one pulls out some of the other's hair at the roots.

When Mark encounters the police surgeon, Corrigan, he learns of the list of surnames found in the shoe of a murdered priest called Father Gorman.

When Mark goes to a village fete, organised by his cousin, at Much Deeping,[4] with the famous mystery writer, Ariadne Oliver, he hears about a house which has been converted from an old inn called the Pale Horse.

Mark also makes an ally of Katherine "Ginger" Corrigan, a girl whom he has met in the area, and who successfully draws Poppy out about the Pale Horse organisation.

In desperation, Mark turns to Poppy again, who mentions that her friend, Eileen Brandon, resigned from a research organisation called CRC (Customers' Reactions Classified) that seems to be connected with the Pale Horse.

Ariadne Oliver contacts Mark with a key connection that she has made: another victim of the Pale Horse (Mary Delafontaine) has lost her hair during her illness.

Francis Iles (Anthony Berkeley Cox) praised the novel in the 8 December 1961 issue of The Guardian: "Mrs Agatha Christie is our nearest approach to perpetual motion.

Also makes use of 'The Box,' a piece of pseudo-scientific hocus-pocus fashionable in the West Country in the 'fifties (one of the things which drove Waugh to the verge of lunacy, as narrated in Pinfold).

article of Entertainment Weekly Issue #1343-44 (26 December 2014–3 January 2015), the writers picked The Pale Horse as an "EW favorite" on the list of the "Nine Great Christie Novels".

Mrs Dane Calthrop from The Moving Finger also reappears in approximately the same role as she played in that book: the rational but devoted Christian who wants the evil stopped.

Mrs Oliver is apprehensive of attending a fete, for reasons that will be apparent to readers of her previous appearance in a Christie novel: Dead Man's Folly.

In 1988, George Trepal, a Mensa Club member, poisoned his neighbours, Pye and Peggy Carr and their children, with thallium introduced in a Coca-Cola Classic bottles eight-pack.

The cast included Rufus Sewell as Mark Easterbrook, Sean Pertwee as Inspector Lejeune, Bertie Carvel as Zachariah Osborne, Kaya Scodelario as Hermia, and Sheila Atim, Rita Tushingham and Kathy Kiera Clarke as the “witches” of Much Deeping.

[15] The Independent noted that it had a "satisfying conclusion despite traditional whodunnit thrills",[16] while The Telegraph asserted that it chucked "the rat-filled kitchen sink into this rewrite of Agatha Christie".