It’s unusual for me to come across an Agatha Christie novel that I can’t place. But, though I read every book she wrote in my teens, though I’ve picked up a lot of them again over the years since them, though I’ve seen any number of dramatistions, I remembered this, the third Miss Marple novel, not at all.

I wondered why. Was it me or was it the book?

It was time to find out – I’d read the first two novels, I planned to read them all – so this was top of my reading queue.

Things began promisingly.

Jerry Burton, a war-wounded pilot had taken his doctor’s advice. He’d found a quiet house in a country village and he was going to spend a few months there with his sister, Joanna. It was to be a place to rest, relax recuperate …

The time and the place were captured beautifully.

But then. Jerry received a poison pen letter. It was fortunate he knew exactly what to do with it.

“The correct procedure, I believe is to drop it into the fire with a sharp exclamation of disgust.”

He did just that. But then he learned that his was not the first letter. Nearly all of the villagers had received one. And so he was as interested to meet his new neighbours as they were to meet the incomers.

At first it was almost a game, but that soon changed. One woman received a letter and on the very same day she was found dead, poisoned, and by her side a scrap of paper bearing the words “I can’t go on”.

The police investigation intensified. And they welcomed Jerry’s interest in the
case. He was in the village but not of the village, and so he could hear and see things that the police could not.

And then there was another death, in the same house as the first. A clear case of murder. And so the question had to be asked: was that first death really suicide, or was it murder too?

The police couldn’t identify the killer, and the villager grew more and more anxious.

The vicar’s wife asked a fried to stay. A friend who might be able to shed some light on what was going on. Miss Jane Marple.

Of course she could, and of course she did …

I can’t fault The Moving Finger as a study of village life. It catches the community, the gossip, the way life spreads beautifully, and there is some lovely, gentle humour as Jerry and Joanna adapt to a rather more old-fashioned way of doing things than they are used to.

I can’t fault the main storyline either. The business of the poison pen letters interesting and, though the plot had quiet moments, the construction was clever and there was almost always something to hold the interest.

In the end it was classic Christie: it made perfect sense but I hadn’t worked it out.

What I did struggle with was the characterisation: most of the characters were very well done, but one or two almost felt like parodies of Christie characters. Just a little forced, a little overwritten.

Miss Marple didn’t seem quite herself either. She arrived very late in the corner, and she offered a few suggestions as she sat, knitting, in one of the vicarage armchairs.

I wondered if Agatha Christie hadn’t intended her to be there at all, but as she neared the end of the book she realised she lacked a character who could see things through to the end.

This is the shortest of the Miss Marple novels, and I can’t help thinking it could have gained from being a little longer. A  little more space for the characters to establish themselves, a little more space for Miss Marple herself might have made all the difference.

And maybe a little more plot, instead of a romantic subplot that didn’t really work.

So, now it’s all over, I do think the failing was with the book and not me. But I’m glad I re-read it.

It’s a good story, it’s  a very readable book, but Agatha Christie has written much better, and I want to move on to one of her books I could happily pick up again and again.

The next Miss Marple is one of them – A Murder is Announced – and it’s already off the shelf.

So taken was I with the idea of reading Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple novels in sequence that I had the second book down off the shelf before I had finished the first. I hadn’t read the book for years, but I’d seen a television adaptation not so long ago and I could remember the characters, and pretty much all of the plot. But I was still eager to press on, and to see what reading the original novel might show me.

The first thing I noticed was that ‘The Body in the Library’ was quite thin – this was a much shorter novel than ‘The Murder at the Vicarage’. And that there was quite an interval between the two books – twelve years and twenty more novels. I wonder why? Did she not suit the ideas her creator had? Did she not see  potential in the character? I wonder …

The story was very quickly off and running. Mrs Bantry woke thinking that she had dreamt of her maid crying, ” … there’s a body in the library.” She hadn’t. And there was. An unknown young woman, wrapped in an unknown rug.

Colonel Bantry called the proper authorities and Mrs Bantry called her good friend Miss Marple.

“You want me to come up?”

“Yes, I’m sending the car down for you.”

“Of course dear, if you think I can be of any comfort to you …”

“Oh, I don’t want comfort. But you’re so good at bodies.”

“Oh no, indeed. My little successes have been mostly theoretical.”

“But you’re very good at murders. She’s been murdered you see, strangled. What I feel is that if one has got to have a murder actually happening in one’s house, one might as well enjoy it, if you know what I mean. That’s why I want you to come and help me find out who did it and unravel the mystery and all that. It really is rather thrilling, isn’t it?”

“Well. of course, my dear, if I can be of any help to you.”

This was the same world but a rather different Miss Marple. A gentler character, with a wider social circle and an enhanced reputation. I wondered if I should go back and check what had happened in the short stories that Miss Marple had appeared in between her first two novels. And I wondered where a lady as curious and practical as Mrs Bantry had been when a body was found in the vicarage next door to her good friend Miss Marple.

But on with the story.

Colonel Melchett and Inspector Slack had another murder to investigate. The made enquiries about missing persons, and swiftly identified the murder victim as eighteen-year old Ruby Keene, who had been working as a dancer at the Majestic Hotel in the seaside resort of Danemouth, eighteen miles away.

The first suspect was Basil Blake. He lived near the Bantrys. He worked in the film industry. He had a vibrant, party-going lifestyle. He had been seen with a blonde young woman …

Mrs Bantry promptly decided that she and Miss Marple should take a holiday in Dartmouth.

Ruby had been reported missing by Conway Jefferson. He had been a successful industrialist, but he had lost his legs in a terrible accident that also claimed the lives of his wife, son and daughter. He was a rich, elderly invalid, his household made up of Mark Gaskell, his daughter’s widower, Adelaide Jefferson, his son’s widow, and Peter Carmody, Adelaide’s nine-year old son from an earlier marriage.

A strange household, and Ruby had nearly become part of it. Mr Jefferson had taken a shine to Ruby, and she had played up to him. He planned to adopt her, to settle some money on her.

Interesting characters. Strange relationships. And motives for murder.

Mr Jefferson was determined that the truth should be uncovered and so he called in his good friend Sir Henry Clithering, a retired police commissioner. Now Sir Henry was already acquainted with Miss Marple and Mr Jefferson was an old friend of the Bantrys. That made it very easy for Miss Marple to meet and talk with all of the concerned parties.

She didn’t uncover new facts, or use her little grey cells, but she added observation of the characters and their relationships to her observations of the corpse.

The psychology and the conversations were wonderful . I was struck by Mr Jefferson’s account of his relationship with the dead girl, by his understanding of why he had acted as he had. And by Adelaide Jefferson’s apparent honesty about her relationship with her father, how it had changed, how she saw the future. I hoped that she was being honest, that she wasn’t involved with the murder.

The police also took an interest in Ruby’s cousin, Josie Turner, who had brought her to work in the hotel, and in her dance partner, tennis professional Raymond Starr.

And then there was another body. It seemed that another missing young woman.

That allowed Miss Marple to see what had happened.

The action moved back to St Mary Mead, and it was lovely to see Len and Griselda Clement, and one of two more of Miss Marple’s neighbours again.

Miss Marple demonstrated that the police were thinking along the wrong lines, and saved that day. The police sprang a trap, the truth was revealed and justice was served.

This wasn’t Agatha Christie’s most elegant mystery, but it was serviceable the logic worked. I found the degree of unbelievability acceptable – though there was one little cheat, something that Miss Marple found out that wasn’t mentioned until much later.

But I was satisfied as I turned the pages, and satisfied when I reached the ending.

Now I just have to decide whether I should move on to the next novel – The Moving Finger, which I remember not at all – or go back to read the short stories that make up The Thirteen Problems ..

“We at the height are ready to decline.
There is a tide in the affairs of men
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat,
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures.”

(Julius Caesar IV.ii.269–276)

I couldn’t resist picking up a lovely facsimile reprint of the first edition of Agatha Christie’s Taken at the Flood. A lovely cover, a story that I couldn’t recall either reading or watching, and that wonderful Shakespearean epigraph.

Yes, Taken at the Flood looked very promising.

A few weeks after marrying an attractive young widow, after a whirlwind romance, Gordon Cloade is killed in an air raid.

A tragic loss, and there is a second blow to the family. There was no valid will, and so Rosaleen, a widow for the second time, was left in possession of all her husband’s wealth.

Gordon had always supported his family and his widow would have done the same, but her brother stopped her. And David told her that they should stand on their own two feet, as the two of them had always done.

The Cloades would see no money during Rosaleen’s lifetime. Only when she died would the estate revert to them.

They struggled to manage in the economic downturn that followed the war.

And so David was unpopular with the Cloade family. But one of them, Lynne, a demobbed WREN, understood his point of view, agreed with him. They were drawn together.

And Lynne began to have doubts about her engagement to her cousin Rowley. He was a farmer, a reserved occupation, and so he hadn’t been away to war like her. Maybe she had changed. Maybe they had grown apart.

All of this is set out wonderfully. The characters are beautifully drawn, the period is caught perfectly and there are definite story possibilities.

And there is more.

A story becomes known. That Rosaleen’s first husband, Robert Underhay, had spoken of disappearing, faking his own death, to set his wife free. And then he had spoken of starting a new life with a new name. Enoch Arden, after the hero of Tennyson’s poem.

An Enoch Arden arrives at the village inn. And shortly after he is found dead …

Hercule Poirot is drawn into the case: he heard the story of Robert Underhay being told and he has been consulted by one of the Cloade family.

An intricate and very clever mystery, with lots of lovely details, unfolds. And it is a mystery driven by the characters. As facts about them, and about what happened,  emerge. I reevaluated them and I rethought what might have happened.

Everything worked beautifully until the end. I can’t say why, but I felt a little cheated by the resolution of the mystery. Though the epigraph did fit …

And then there is a final twist. The concept was perfect, but I’m afraid the execution was  a little melodramatic.

Taken at the Flood works beautifully as a character study and a period piece, it’s just that the mystery creaks a little.

Yet it held my attention from start to finish.