Tag Archives: Agatha Christie

Book review

The 4.50 from Paddington by Agatha Christie, 1957

I’ve always felt very slightly guilty at never having read anything by Agatha Christie. TheTuesday Murder Club stories assuaged this a little, although I would never had read them were it not for the association with Richard Osman. The 4.50 from Paddington was a very late attempt to address this shortcoming. It features one of the author’s recurring detective characters, Miss Marple. Overall I think it is quite seriously flawed. The murder mystery element of the story depends on some utterly bizarre behaviour by the protagonist. There are a series of other serious structural flaws, but these could be forgiven if the murderer had not seemed desperately to do everything he possibly could to be caught. Obviously there is no way I can make this point without extensively spoiling the book for you, so if you ever intend to read this please turn away now.

The novel opens as a traditional ‘murder on a train’ puzzle. Mrs McGillicuddy, a friend of Miss Marple, is travelling by train when her carriage passes another train going in the same direction. When the trains are stopped next to each other she sees a woman being strangled. This was obviously a very strange time to choose to strangle someone. She is convinced this is a case of murder. She reports the attack, but the police are unable to find a body or any other evidence.

Miss Marple decides to investigate, of course. By some analysis of train timetables that was quite dull she works out that the body was probably thrown from the train into the grounds of Rutherford Hall, a stately home just outside Brackhampton. She asks her friend Lucy Eyelesbarrow, to help her investigate by taking a job at the hall as a housekeeper. Lucy is a promising character, but I could not move past the fact that Christie asks us to accept that despite her having a First in Mathematics from Oxford she decides to become a housekeeper. A well paid housekeeper, but a domestic servant nonetheless. I can see Lucy serves a useful role in the novel – she is bright and observant, and acts as Miss Marple’s eyes and ears on the ground within the Hall (a more conventional approach would have been for Miss Marple to have somehow get herself invited to stay with the family) but this is still a deeply implausible career choice for a first class mathematician, and is profoundly old-fashioned. Is this really the optimum career choice for a bright young woman in the 1950s? One character observes of Lucy “She scares the life out of me, she’s so devastatingly efficient. No man would ever dare marry that girl”. Sadly, Christie abandoned the character after this novel, and she never reappears.

We are then introduced to the inhabitants of Rutherford Hall: the cranky patriarch Luther Crackenthorpe, his unmarried daughter, Emma. and his sons Cedric, a painter; Harold, a businessman, and Alfred, occupation undetermined. His older daughter Edith died four years before the novel begins, and her husband Bryan and son Alex are part of the extended family. Another son died in the second world war. Local doctor, Dr Quimper frequently comes to the hall to see to Luther and is ‘close friends’ with Emma. These characters are paraded before the reader several times, and it is quite obvious that this is a list of suspects from whom we are being invited to select the killer.

Lucy uses her free time to search the hall’s grounds, and quickly finds the body hidden in a stone sarcophagus in a barn. Having a stone Greco-Roman sarcophagus lying around in one’s barn is typical eccentric aristocratic behaviour, nor worthy of further comment. The police are of course contacted, and resume their investigation into the original murder, led by Inspector Craddock of the Yard (When did local police forces start investigating murders in their area instead of calling in Scotland Yard?) The police conclude that the body is either that of a dancer, Anna Stravinska, who had gone missing from a ballet troupe, or a French woman called Martine. Martine may have married the eldest brother who died in the war – Emma reveals that she received a letter a few weeks before the woman’s body was found, claiming that she had married Edmund just before he died. The police speculate that Martine may have been murdered by one of the Crackenthorpe family to prevent her making a claim on Luther’s estate. However the ‘Martine’ theory doesn’t last long – a neighbour, Lady Stoddart-West reveals that she is Martine, Edmund’s former fiancee. She explains that Edmund died before they could be married, and since she married another man soon after the war, she had resolved not to bring up the painful past by telling the Crackenthorpes about their connection. Even the author has to accept that this is profoundly improbable – a woman forms a relationship with a British soldier who is killed in action, only to subsequently years later marry another soldier who just happens to be a near neighbour of the first. But this revelation leaves the identity of the body in the sarcophagus/the woman on the train a mystery.

Things then take a turn for the worse when the entire household is poisoned and Alfred dies. Dr Quimper diagnoses arsenic poisoning. Harold then receives a delivery of poisoned tablets from Dr Quimper and he dies. One would have thought that the focus of suspicion would fall on the doctor at this point – not only has he provided Harold with poisoned tablets, but in his role as a GP he would have ready access to arsenic and other poisons. But no, the focus is mysteriously elsewhere. In the novel’s denouement Miss Marple arranges for Mrs McGillicuddy to see Dr Quimper in a pose similar to that she saw the murder, by pretending to choke. Dr Quimper helps here, and as he does so Mrs McGillicuddy enters the room, sees the doctor against the window with his hands at Miss Marple’s throat, and cries out, “But that’s him – that’s the man on the train!” Miss Marple then wraps the case up in a few paragraphs. Her explanation is that the dead woman was Quimper’s wife, who would not divorce him due to being Catholic. He killed her to be free to marry Emma, and then murdered Harold and Alfred to increase Emma’s share of any inheritance.

I don’t know if many readers would finish this novel and conclude that the explanation given makes sense. Certainly we are asked to accept many leaps of faith: that the Doctor would murder his wife on a moving train while visible from a passing train just five minutes out from the destination; that he would (somehow) throw her body out of the train onto an embankment, arrive later that day to collect it from where it landed, carry it (again, somehow) through the estate to the barn, and leave it there, all the time unseen and uninterrupted; that while a police investigation is underway, he decides to murder some of the other family members in order to increase the proportion of the family inheritance he will receive, when Luther dies, and if he can successfully woo Emma. And so on. The absurdities pile up. The doctor takes fantastical risks for little reward, when far more straightforward options are before him.

The whole novel had an anachronistic feel – although written in the 50’s and seemingly set then, it really is an old-fashioned Edwardian country house murder story, uncomfortably superimposed onto a murder on a train story. That explains why the Doctor kills Harold and Alfred when he does, despite the heavy police presence in the immediate vicinity – the tradition of the country house murder story demands more murders. Miss Marple is here a peripheral character, wheeled out to resolve the mystery in the final pages simply by deciding what has happened rather than by any process of deduction or the use of evidence. Without Mrs McGillicuddy’s identification of the Doctor on the basis of what he looks like from behind – a defence barrister would have fun with that – there is no other evidence of him having committed any crime. Miss Marple makes a strange comment right at the end of the novel, having delivered her speech to the assembled family on how she ‘solved’ the murder:

“I am really very, very sorry that they have abolished capital punishment, because I do feel that if there is anyone who ought to hang it is Dr Quimper”.

Capital punishment in the UK had not been abolished in 1957 and people were still being killed by the state well into the 1960’s. Perhaps this was just Christie’s comment on the campaign for the abolition of capital punishment which was obviously gaining momentum at this point. But I think she was getting ahead of herself – she would have to get a conviction first.

On a more positive note, one has to give the Doctor credit for his cunning plan to misdirect the investigation by suggesting that the victim was Martine, laying a paper trail away from his ex-wife, only for that plan to be foiled by the stunning coincidence of the real Martine being alive and well and living in the neighbourhood. Also, Lucy is a promising character who ably fills the absence of Miss Marple, even if she is the world’s most unlikely housekeeper. But overall this felt like an author well past her prime using some of her ‘greatest hits’ material to keep her publishers happy. Which means I have missed the mark in looking for Christie at her best, and need to keep looking.

The 4.50 from Paddington by Agatha Christie, 1957

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Book review

Yes, you read that correctly – the Tuesday Club Murders, by Agatha Christie, not The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman. The similarities in name are striking though aren’t they? Although in interviews about his novels Richard Osman has regularly acknowledged his debt to Christie, I don’t (so far as I know) think he has ever mentioned this collection of stories. I can’t surely be a coincidence though.

To be fair, this collection of stories is usually published as ‘The Thirteen Problems’. It was first published under that title in the UK in 1932 and it wasn’t until the stories were published in the US the following year that the title The Tuesday Club Murders was adopted. Obviously the publishers have reissued the collection under the US name to capitalise on the popularity of Osman’s novels, even going so far as to describe the stories in the blurb as ‘the original weekday murder club’! To be fair they haven’t mimicked the distinctive cover design used for The Thursday Murder Club and its sequel, The Man Who Died Twice, unlike other recent murder mysteries, but they must have been sorely tempted to do so.

The introduction to the club does seem very similar to Osman’s version:

‘Well,’ said Joyce, ‘it seems to me we are a pretty representative gathering. How would it be if we formed a Club? What is today? Tuesday? We will call it The Tuesday Night Club. It is to meet every week, and each member in turn has to propound a problem. Some mystery of which they have personal knowledge, and to which, of course, they know the answer.’

But this is almost where the structural similarities end. This is a collection of short stories not a novel, and the ‘club’ structure is a weak framing device that isn’t really necessary. Apart from the title, the points of similarity between these stories and Osman’s novels are actually few and far between. They have a similar setting, and the Miss Marple would probably fit in quite well into the group of crime-solving pensioners in The Thursday Murder Club. But the Tuesday ‘Club’ isn’t really a club at all, nothing more than a story telling group of friends, who seem to only meet the once (despite the initial set up) , even if they were probably quite capable of taking on a ‘real’ case or two.

All thirteen stories feature Miss Marple, and all follow the same pattern quite rigidly – some friends gather and share stories about a crime, Miss Marple chuckles to herself and indirectly reveals she has worked out ‘whodunnit’, followed swiftly by the reveal of the criminal’s identity. Invariably she is knitting throughout the story, and almost always drops a stitch or two as a way of emphasising her powers of concentration. There’s little by way of characterisation – you will find more varied personalities in a game of Cluedo (Clue) – descriptive writing is kept to the minimum, and any deviation from the structure comes as a welcome but rare relief. Perhaps that is no surprise – these are some of Christie’s earliest published works, and the first time that Miss Marple appears in print. There is a brief attempt to bring Miss Marple to life in the opening story. She is described in more detail than any other character in the collection:

“She sat erect in the big grandfather chair, Miss Marple wore a black brocade dress, very much pinched in round the waist. Mechlin lace was arranged in a cascade down the front of the bodice. She had on black lace mittens, and a black lace cap surmounted the piled-up masses of her snowy hair. She was knitting, something white and soft and fleecy.”

That’s an interesting portrait that’s worth unpicking a little. Firstly she is sitting in a grandfather chair. The internet is probably the world’s most useful information tool ever developed, but it can’t tell me precisely what a grandfather’s chair looks like – the best description is ‘an easy chair, usually with wings’. I think we can infer from the context that this is a significant, perhaps even dominant chair which allows Miss Marple a place of prominence in the gathering. The black brocade dress – brocade being defined as

“heavy cloth with a raised design often of gold or silver threads” – suggests she is formally if not over-dressed to receive her guests. Mechlin lace is interesting. Christie could easily have just dressed her character in ‘old’ or ‘ornate’ lace, but she specifically chose Mechlin, which is a relic from the nineteenth century and before. Wikipedia as always a mine of information, tells us that:

“In 1755 Mechlin lace went into decline in England….Mechlin lace was also very popular with the English royalty. Queen Mary II, in spite of the prohibition against imported laces, purchased two yards of knotted fringe for her Mechlin ruffles in 1694…George I had a Mechlin cravat, and it was a favourite of Queen Charlotte and Princess Amelia.”

In other words it was a bit old-fashioned even when Queen Victoria came to the throne, and almost a hundred years later I think we can safely say was not the height of fashion! The bodice over which this lace ‘cascades’ is out of date as well, She is dressed almost entirely in black, including black mittens and cap, which strongly suggests someone in mourning. There was no national mourning at this period, and there is no suggestion that she ever married or suffered a family loss. She is just one of those old ladies who prefers to wear black. The constant knitting might suggest a tricoteuse in the shadow of the guillotine, which is apt as Miss Marple’s detective skills would almost certainly have sent many men and a few women to the deaths. In A Christmas Tragedy, one of Miss Marple’s own contributions to the collection, she says of the story’s villain:

“Saunders was hanged .. and a good job too. I have never regretted my part on bringing that man to justice. I’ve no patience with modern humanitarian scruples about capital punishment”.

Clearly Miss Marple isn’t just the sweet little old lady she likes to present herself as.

In detective stories the principal interest is in the challenge – can the reader work out the solution to the mystery before it is revealed? Christie is adept, even in these very early stories, of giving the impression that the mystery can be solved – after all, Miss Marple can work them out with only the information we the reader are given – but really the solutions are almost impossible, and in some cases quite random. The use of mystery poisons features in several of the stories, as do several other mystery story stand-bys – invisible ink, swopped identities, even Cornish smugglers.

I’ve been determined to add Christie to my list of reviewed novels – her absence seemed a real gap, but I don’t think I chose a very sensible starting point. These stories are static and repetitive, and I quickly lost interest in the crimes and their inevitable solution. Of course Christie went on to be a much more mature writer, and to judge her on the strength of this collection alone would be unfair. So she remains, for now, on my non-existent ‘to be read’ list.

The Tuesday Club Murders, by Agatha Christie, 1932

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