This book was an alternate in our Siblings’ Book Club last year, and I try to read everything on our lists. Agatha Christie is always a welcome addition to our annual list-of-ten, and this one was enjoyable yet forgettable—which is actually a good thing.
There’s something comforting about keeping a thin murder mystery in your back pocket for those moments during your day which you can steal for a quick read. There’s also something a little disturbing about finding comfort in stealing and murder, but that’s a discussion better saved for a later time. I savored my moments away from e-mails and sermon prep to place myself back in the Fortescue home of 1950s England, trying to unravel along with Inspector Neele and Miss Marple the mysteries surrounding a recent death.
Rex Fortiscue was a wealthy businessman who was found dead, murdered in fact via a poison placed in his marmalade. Everyone in the household (and without) is a suspect again, from the wife to the children to the maids. Motives and means abound, which is why my suspicions went immediately to the only person (discounting the “good guys,” Neele and Marple) who had neither motive nor means: the missionary. Aha!
Of course, I was wrong. The elderly and bedbound Miss Ramsbottom was not the killer, which left me with about 35 other suspects to choose from. I never chose correctly.
What I love about mysteries (and I don’t read that many) is that a reader can take either of two approaches in their reading. They can try their darndest to be the detective themselves, deciphering the clues and feeling a sense of pride in their incomparable deductive skills. Or, like me, they can just go with the flow of the book, following every red herring down every dead-end channel that the author intended, letting the real detectives do the work for them. Both methods can be satisfying, so as long as the reader doesn’t go into a book planning to hate every minute of it, which is how some people feel about mysteries.
I mentioned that this book was “forgettable” and that it’s a good thing. What I mean is that I finished this book over a month ago and I honestly couldn’t recall the killer’s identity. The deaths themselves have remained etched in my memory, like the maid strangled in the garden and left with a clothespin pinned to her nose, but the killer’s face…I just couldn’t recall! This is good, because it’s a sign of re-readability.
I remember my mother working her way through Agatha Christie’s bibliography multiple times throughout my childhood. She also watched the BBC versions of Christie’s cases on PBS’s Masterpiece Theatre, and I always wondered how in the world she could do it, having already read the books and solved the mysteries. Now I know. Agatha Christie wrote 66 detective novels during her career, and I bet you very few die-hard fans could tell you the plot and conclusion of a given title offhand. No, they’d have to re-read the book to tell you that, and they’d be delighted with such an assignment.
I really enjoyed the chance to read another Christie title. I’ll never get through all 66, but I’ll always welcome the annual opportunity to escape into Agatha Christe’s little worlds of English chaos.
©2024 E.T.
Read More from Agatha Christie:
- The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie (1926)
- Death on the Nile by Agatha Christie (1937)
- Hercule Poirot’s Christmas by Agatha Christie (1938)
- A Pocket Full of Rye by Agatha Christie (1953)