Unseen for 60 years, the Mail proudly present Agatha Christie's lost masterpiece, The Capture of Cerberus

...Why is this such a genuinely exciting find? Partly because the story is so unusual for her. It is one of her rare excursions into making direct political comment, which is why it was never published.

The Capture Of Cerberus (she wrote a completely different short story with the same title in 1947) revolves around a dictator called August Hertzlein, who is clearly Adolf Hitler.

In the course of the plot, Christie expresses the naive hope that Hitler could have been converted to Christianity and begun preaching love and peace....

...But no publisher was going to touch such an inflammatory plot in 1939, which was when Christie submitted Cerberus to Strand magazine as one of the short stories in her series The Labours Of Hercules.

The lost story begins abruptly, with no warning, in the boldface paragraph that begins,

Hercule Poirot sipped his apéritif and looked out across the Lake of Geneva. He sighed. He had spent his morning talking to certain diplomatic personages, all in a state of high agitation, and he was tired. For he had been unable to offer them any comfort in their difficulties.