It is usually Aidan who writes reviews of crime novels.
However, I was recently reading one of the early Agatha Christies, so I thought
I would share my thoughts on. The Thirteen Problems pitch together a collection
of short stories that Agatha Christie had written about a character named Jane
Marple in the latter half of the 1920s. In the collection, a dinner party tell
each other unsolved mysteries, usually involving a murder, while the rest of
the party try and work out who done it. To their bafflement, the unassuming
little old lady who sits in the corner works out each solution correctly. Even
those that baffled the greatest minds in the crime fighting industry.
We start with The Tuesday Night Club, first written for The
Royal Magazine in December 1927. This is Miss Marple’s literary debut, and
she’s the focus from the start. In one long paragraph, we get our outfit, her
love of knitting, and her quick glancing looks at the other guests, which we
are later to find out her brain can quickly deduce a lot of human nature
from. I guess we’d call Marple a
variation of cold reader, in that she has been around so many people in her
life and was of the experience that people tend to make the same mistakes over and
over, that she subconsciously recognised things from body language or attire
alone. Now, it depends how willing you are to believe that. It is no different
from Sherlock Holmes technique, yet I know of people who boycott all of Conan
Doyle’s works because they believe he promoted anti-sceptic believes through
them. There is an amusing tale Orson Welles told about studying cold reading in
real life to research F for Fake, only to blurt out a friends parent had died
because he’d subconsciously twigged from her body language and both of them
freaked out. But then, Orson Welles anecdotes come with the warning up front
that he might be “lying his ass off”. This sort of intuition led solution is
different from the evidence gathering Poirot, although by the time the novels
started to be written, Marple was more interested in evidence too. Cold reading
and gut feeling might work for short stories, but for the full thing, proof is
required.
The first mystery is a standard crime trope. Three sit down
to dinner, one dies of poisoning, whodunnit. The former commissioner of
Scotland Yard (Sir Henry) tells the story, and then a doctor, a lawyer, crime
novelist Raymond West (Marple’s nephew) and West’s intended wife, Joyce, all
try to give the solution. But then they remember Miss Marple is in the room,
and she gives them the correct identity of the murderer. This was that rare
Christie solution that even as a kid I got in advance, as it relies on an
ingredient I was quite fond of at the time!
In 1926, the bit most people remember of Agatha Christie’s
life happened, when she disappeared for eleven days, shortly after discovering
his husband’s affair with a family friend. At the time it was seen as a
publicity stunt, nowadays we understand mental health a bit better and recognise
breakdowns and PTSD and other likelier causes. However, one fall out from this
series of events is what I’d note as being an increase of cheating husbands
doing away with their wives. I wonder what gave her the inspiration for that
one!
(For those worried, Agatha went on to marry an
archaeologist, travelled the world as an explorer, became a millionaire and the
best-selling author of all time, and knew a legit 30 plus ways to kill an
individual and get away with it. Colonel Christie, on the other hand, is a
punchline in the story of one of our great female writers. I think she might
have got the last laugh on him…)
The Idol House of Astarte is one of Christie’s dabbles into
the supernatural. Well, a shallow dip of a toe. There’s an idol house (a folly
dressed up as a pagan religious place) in the grounds of a Dartmoor mansion
house. During a fancy-dress party, the girl all the bad guys want pretends to
be the Angel of Death but when she goes to smite one of the other guests, they
die for real. Of course, this case is rational disguised as supernatural, and
when that is accepted there can only be one possible killer. Much like a
certain Jonathan Creek episode, or an influential book by Israel Zangwill from
the 1890s.
If you’ve ever seen Penn and Teller’s Fool Us, you’ll know
they talk in a sort of magician’s code, so that those in the know understand
what they mean, but it doesn’t spoil it for the rest of us. Consider any
spoilers in this review marked up in a similar, pseud writer, way as above.
Miss Marple, of course, is the one who ignores all of the
supernatural dressing and focuses solely on the motive and opportunity.
Although I’d just like to say that Diana Ashley’s idea of an
orgy is entirely different from anyone reading this.
Raymond West is next up, with Ingots of Gold, to tell us a
rather dull tale about the Spanish Armada gold in Cornwall. It sets up a moral
which was important then and probably still is, namely, don’t judge a book by
its cover (or a person by their past). However, the crime writer tells us a
long and slow story of a robbery, and you can sense the fiendish disappointment
among the dinner party that the tale had no murders.
Not to worry, artist Joyce is up next, and The Blood-Stained
Pavement is a cracker. One of the best tales in the collection. It has an eerie
quality, like watching a nightmare from afar, helped by the sympathetic (yet
bewildered) narrator. To say much else (this involves another innocent done in,
suffice to say) is to spoil not only this, but a much more famous novel where
Christie reuses the main idea. And why not? As whodunnits go, it was a cracker.
Did I say one book? OK, maybe slightly more than one book
reuses the idea…
Lawyer Pretherick gives us Motive v Opportunity, which is a
legal tale. A swindler gets their name as sole inheritor of the estate of a
dying old man, robbing his kids. When the will is opened on death, the page is
blank. Those who had the opportunity to change the will were the swindlers who
had no motive to do so, and those who had the motive to change it in their
favour had no opportunity to do so. This is the sort of intriguing set up which
can only really sustain 20 pages or so, and the Blairite solution may have
seemed obvious to some from early on. However, that is surely worth it for one
of the rarest solutions in any crime novel. The one where, on finding out the
solution, the response of everyone (including the Commissioner of Scotland Yard
and Miss Marple herself) is akin to “go on, my son”.
The first half of the book ends with Miss Marple telling us
her own tale. The Thumb Mark of St Peter. Christie revels at giving more of a
voice to Jane Marple, and her loving disdain (not a typo) for niece Mabel.
Mabel has been party to one of those traditional events: people sat down to
dinner, one of them was poisoned. Yes, just like in the first story. However,
this one is far better than the opening story, as Miss Marple is a far more
interesting character, and a rare insight into her mind on how she goes about
solving the various crimes she comes across is a welcome read. Even if the
answer appears to be trust in intuition, prayer, and dumb luck, and then add
10% research to see if that backs it up. Like any magician, when you find out,
it seems less mystical, but then, I suppose that’s the point, that Marple is
just an ordinary old woman who happens to stumble across the scene of the crime
rather a lot. When not focused on character, this story does not give enough of
the clues up front for the reader to deduce what is going on until extremely
late in the day, so it is a mark below the best tales in the collection.
There was then a break in the stories. Christie focused on
The Seven Dials Mystery and wrote a few Poirot short stories. However, in late
1929, Miss Marple was back at another dinner party. As in real life, so in the
story it is a year on from the first party, and this time we are in St Mary
Mead. Sir Henry is staying with friends: Colonel Bantry and his wife Dolly, who
appear again in later Marple novels. In fact, unlike most of Christie’s Poirot
timeline characters, the Colonel ages, as his death in the early 1960s sets the
entire plot of The Mirror Crack’d into motion. (Also, if Marple is old and
frail in the late 1920s, just how old is she when we get to the 1960s? The
answer in At Bertrams Hotel is early 70s, but then Agatha Christie was early 70s
when she wrote that novel! The easiest way to deal with this variation of UNIT
dating is to backdate everything. The last chronological Marple appearance is
in Nemesis, which is set one year after A Caribbean Mystery, so in 1965/66. In
the final Marple novels, she is clearly a lot older and frailer than she was in
her heyday. If we put her in her early 90s by the time of Nemesis, this would
put her in her mid-late 50s during the Thirteen Problems. Certainly, an old or
experienced age in the 1920s, just don’t tell my parents they’re older than
Miss Marple now!)
Anyhow, the collection bursts back into life with The Blue
Geranium, a great tale of people using supernatural wall dressing (literally)
to disguise cold blooded murder. This was the story that grabbed me most on
first reading, and decades later it is easy to see why, as the victim becomes
aware of their intended demise months ahead of the murder but is unable to
convince anyone what is happening to prevent it. That added horror – of knowing
someone means to do you harm but not finding anyone able to save you – gives
The Blue Geranium an added kick even after the rational side kicks in. Working
out the solution ahead of time may rely on knowing things which have fallen
somewhat out of fashion in the 90+ years since publication, but we can hardly
blame Christie for that one. (Although I did once see a critique of Mary
Wollstonecraft, that said she said nothing about the modern-day civil rights
fight. I can’t see what possessed her not to foresee events that happened 300
years after her death either…)
A new doctor tells us the story of The Companion, in which
the odd bit from the norm of a usual crime tale turns out to be the pivotal
part of the piece. It is set in Las Palmas but could be set in Torquay. Not
much to say about a “not that way round” tale.
Sir Henry is next up with The Four Suspects, about a murder
in which only four people could have committed the murder. (Actually, I’m not
convinced it could only be four, but that’s besides the point.) The window
dressing of a German secret society out to murder a defector, and man resigned
to his fate, give the filling to the tale. In fact, there are two suspects, and
one seems unlikely.
Miss Marple regals us with A Christmas Tragedy, which uses
the exact same plot device as one of the earlier stories. I told you she liked
that plot twist. The exact method in this telling is reliant on a bit too much
of a handwave, however. It was done better in the book.
The disappointing second half of the book livens up with The
Herb of Death. Dolly Bantry can’t tell a story properly, and the comedic
mistiming of every beat adds a livelier narrative to proceedings than in the
past three stories. Using the enthusiastic but forgetful narrator, and putting
in the clues matter of fact, I confess I forget the finish and was wrong footed
by it, 20 years on from when I first read it! The clues are all there too, but
better disguised than in most of the stories, and we are left with a truly
hideous character who hides their toxic nature under a guise of being such a
good person, even the narrator is slightly confused by it decades later. Miss
Marple spotted it, of course, but then she had the benefit of being written by
the author!
Alas, the collection which was quite good ends on two low
notes. The first is a story by actress Jane Helier (the weakest character in
the collection) which ends on a deserved mediocre note and her worry that the
world is full of Miss Marples. The last story, Death by Drowning, has nothing
to do with the dinner parties, and involves Sir Henry solving a murder
committed in St Mary Mead. He bumps into Marple, who writes the solution of the
crime on a piece and paper and puts it in Sir Henrys pocket. Of course, she
turns out to be right, but only appears on two pages out of thirty. Dryly in a
collection of stories that wouldn’t stretch to novel length, this one suffers
because it feels like a novel cut down to thirty pages. We needed more Marple,
we need to flesh out the crime and the victims, we needed to give the murderer
an actual grounding in the tale. It feels like a story Agatha got bored with. A
bum note to end on.
That was too overtly a negative bit to end on though. Of the
thirteen tales, three are great, and the rest are at least enjoyable, except
for The Affair at the Bungalow. The star of the show remains Miss Jane Marple,
whose mind and opinions take centre stage even before the rest of the
characters notice. Poirot might be the detective who steals the spotlight from
everyone in the vicinity, but as I get older, the sharper eye on society that
Christie gives Marple is the one I learn to appreciate more and more.
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