This week, we're enjoying ourselves at the Malice Domestic conference, an event which - among other things - honors the name and memory of Agatha Christie in its Agatha Awards. In keeping with the spirit of this weekend, then, we have made another trip to the Classic Mysteries vault and found, for your enjoyment, some of Miss Jane Marple's earliest crimes. Perhaps I ought to clarify that: Miss Marple, of course, did not commit the crimes - in fact, she solved a whole series of crimes, mysteries which were puzzling a lot of other people including some very high ranking policemen. She did so in a series of short stories by Agatha Christie, known as The Tuesday Club Murders. A quick check online reveals that this all-too-brief anthology of thirteen stories is fairly difficult to find by itself, but the stories are included in collections of all the Miss Marple short stories, and your mystery bookseller should have no trouble finding one for you. Here's what I had to say about The Tuesday Club Murders when I first reviewed it nearly a decade ago. As always, it has been updated slightly, mostly to talk about availability:
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They must have been interesting meetings – those Tuesday evening get-togethers to talk about unsolved mysteries. What an interesting group: you had an ex-commissioner of Scotland Yard, a doctor, a distinguished author, and several other people, all of whom met regularly to talk about baffling cases. They often came up with interesting and provocative solutions – the only trouble being that their solutions were wrong. For the right answers, they had to rely on just one member of the group, an elderly woman described – rather unfairly – by another member as “the typical old maid of fiction.” Yet she was the one person in the group who came up with the correct answers every time. Nice work for Miss Jane Marple – in The Tuesday Club Murders, by Agatha Christie.
A few weeks ago, I spoke of another collection of Agatha Christie short stories, featuring the exploits of Hercule Poirot in The Labors of Hercules. A friend of mine suggested that it might be a good idea to talk about some of Miss Marple’s shorter cases as well, for she appears in twenty short stories. Thirteen of them were in the first collection of Miss Marple short stories, called The Tuesday Club Murders when they were published in the United States. The original title in Britain was The Thirteen Problems. According to Mark Campbell’s excellent book about Agatha Christie, the first six of them were written in 1928 for Sketch Magazine, which make these the first stories about Miss Marple, predating her first book-length appearance in 1930 in Murder at the Vicarage. Christie wrote an additional seven stories to round out the collection, and The Thirteen Problems was published in 1931.
Miss Marple’s friends and acquaintances in the Tuesday club tend to be a little dismissive of Miss Marple. After all, what experience can this little old lady possibly have of crime and violence? But Miss Marple points out that her long experience of life in a small village has given her a great deal of insight into human behavior. And she uses that insight to draw parallels between the small everyday mysteries of village life and the kind of criminal activity that may lie behind the mysteries being tackled by the club and its members. Does that mean, as Sir Henry Clithering says in one of the stories, that Miss Marple’s little village is a hotbed of crime and vice?
Not at all, Miss Marple assures him. I’m sure I never said anything of the kind. The only thing I ever said was that human nature is much the same in a village as anywhere else, only one has opportunities and leisure for seeing it at closer quarters.
So Miss Marple puts that knowledge of human nature to work in these thirteen cases, solving puzzles that occasionally had baffled police and other observers. She explains the mysterious death of a salesman’s wife. She solves the mystery of a seemingly impossible murder at a mysterious house dedicated to a Phoenician goddess. A wife is drowned – and Miss Marple finds the solution in a painting of bloodstains. An old lady dies in a room where the painted flowers on the wall somehow change colors. An architect is accused of murdering a young woman. A woman appears to have murdered her traveling companion for no reason. Thirteen cases, all told. Thirteen ingenious solutions by Miss Marple.
Through it all, Christie plays quite fairly with us – though I will admit to having been surprised by many of the plot twists and the ultimate solutions; Christie deserved her reputation for pinning her fictional murders on the least likely suspects. But when Miss Marple draws her parallels with the everyday mysteries of village life to solve these ingenious crimes, we are forced to admit that, for the most part, we have been treated quite fairly by the author.
It’s also worth noting, of course, that the short story form has advantages for those of us who love to read, even though we are pressed for time. A good, page-turning novel is a delight, to be sure – but short stories can fill in when we have a few minutes to spare. These puzzles provide a lot of mental stimulation, and I find them a great deal of fun. I assure you that a Tuesday evening or any other day for that matter spent with Miss Marple and Agatha Christie will never be a waste of your time.
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You can listen to the original audio review by clicking here.
Next: The Poisoned Chocolates Case, by Anthony Berkeley
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