Of all the avid readers in the world, only a tiny percentage have read fewer Agatha Christie novels than I have. A Murder Is Announced is my first, so a reader has to have read exactly zero Christie novels to be less familiar with her books than I still am. And even though I believe this Miss Marple novel is a good start toward becoming familiar with Christie's work, it leaves me with more questions than answers about her style and what to expect from the author's other novels.
For that reason, this is not really a review, as such, of A Murder Is Announced other than to say that it was Christie's fiftieth book (the count includes short story compilations in both the UK and the US), and that it is a variation of the locked room mystery genre. It all begins with this ad placed in a village weekly:
"A murder is announced and will take place on Friday, October 29, at Little Paddocks at 6:30 p.m. Friends please accept this, the only intimation."
From there, it becomes a matter of using the process of elimination to determine which of the residents and visiting neighbors could have possibly killed someone right on schedule in a room filled with potential witnesses. It's all competently written and quite engaging, but it left me wondering about a few things:
- This is the fourth Miss Marple mystery, so by now she is a well established character. Why then does she not appear until almost one hundred pages into the book, and why does she remain more a side-character even then than a character with a whole series of her own?
- I couldn't help feeling just a little bit cheated as a reader by Christie's solution to the original murder and the ones that followed because most of the clues Marple uses to identify the killer are very obscure ones just barely mentioned (I'm not convinced all of them even were mentioned).
- The longest chapter in the book is the "recap" at the end when Marple and Chief Inspector Craddock go step-by-step describing to an assembled group of side-characters everything that's happened offstage - largely, things they and the reader have no way of knowing beforehand.
- Was this "tell-don't-show" approach more acceptable in the 1940s and 1950s than I find it to be today? In my estimation, it makes Christie's mysteries seem less clever, not more clever, even though I saw a couple of reviews written in the 1950s that gushed about her cleverness.
- Does Miss Marple always get such a limited page-count, and is Hercule Poirot's exposure in his books as limited as hers is in her own?
This feels like an interesting choice to kick off your Agatha Christie reading! Not that I'm one to say anything. I've only read one Agatha Christie myself.
ReplyDeleteI am left wondering how representative it is of Christie's work, and I'll be trying a Poirot novel next to see if that character has more of a presence in Christie's novels than Miss Marple seems to have. Which one have you read of hers?
DeleteI do enjoy Christie's writing; it's easy and engaging. But I don't love all her books equally. And while I like Miss Marple, I often prefer her Hercule Poirot and her standalone mysteries more. So maybe you'd like one of those better, too. Like Death on the Nile or The Man in the Brown Suit or Murder on the Orient Express.
ReplyDeleteI've got two or three of the Poirot novels around that I picked up late last year intending to read them at some point...my excuse to keep buying books despite the hundreds and hundreds of them that are all around me already. Also, I think, some short stories featuring Poirot. He'll be next.
DeleteI've not read this one so my experience of it is from the Joan Hickson dramatisation of it, which is very good. And I do often wonder if Christie's books are just a bit more suited to the screen than they are to reading. Sacrilege to say it perhaps and possibly my opinion is coloured by the wonderful performances of Joan Hickson and David Suchet. I have a few favourites, The Sittaford Mystery, The 4.50 from Paddington, The Man in the Brown Suit, They Came to Baghdad. She wrote so many books too, that there has to be more than a few duds. LOL
ReplyDeleteThis one is not at all a dud, but it surprised me in some ways. It's fairly complicated and that's magnified by the number of characters involved, all of whom are suspects at one time or another. First she introduces them with formal titles (Miss or Mrs. so and so, The Reverend and Mrs. so and so, etc.), then she switches to first names only, or even nicknames. If I hadn't taken notes, I would have been completely lost.
DeleteI've only seen one movie version of her work, "The ABC Murders," I think it was called. I really liked that movie a lot, partially because it is a recent one and the actors were so good. I'll have to try some of those you mentioned.
I don’t think I’ve read this one yet.
ReplyDeleteI have a couple of Agatha's books to read. This reminds me...
ReplyDeleteDo you have much experience reading her books? I obviously don't, so your perception of her mysteries might be very different from mine.
DeleteHi Sam, when I was young I read quite a few Agatha Christie novels and I was hooked. But after decades away I came back to Agatha Christie and so far I have read And Then There Were None which I didn't care for and Murder on the Orjent Express which I really enjoyed. But I am not as hooked as I once was although I have yet to try Miss Marple. My problem I think is that compared to other mysteries I have read I haven't seen as much character development in Miss Christie's books. But I need to read a few more to accurately judge.
ReplyDeleteMiss Marple, in this one, doesn't seem very well developed, but I know that may be a cumulative thing, so it's hard to judge. I was really struck by how few pages Marple appears on in the novel, though, because some of the side-characters have larger presences than she does. I'm still trying to decide which one, and how to work it in, is going to be next.
DeleteMy first Miss Marple (after I started blogging) was Murder at the Vicarage and I like it a lot. I had read a lot of Agatha Christie books in my teens and later, but it had been years and I only remembered one of them. That was The Murder of Roger Aykroyd.
ReplyDeleteA Murder is Announced was the 4th Miss Marple I read, 5 years later. It is one of my top Miss Marple books. It is fairly common for Miss Marple to show up later in the book, and it happens a good bit with Hercule Poirot, but mostly in the later books. It took me a good number of books to become used to her writing, although there is variety in some of her books. I am a confirmed Christie fan though. In my opinion it takes a while to acclimate to her style and there are some books that are so so. The last books she wrote are supposed to be her worst, but I don't think I have read any of those.
I don't like the books (by any author, of any period) where the facts of the case are reviewed over again at the end. Very unrealistic. Obviously, it must have worked for some readers.
Actually the vintage female author I prefer over Agatha Christie is Margery Allingham. But not many readers of mysteries in that period would agree with me. And Rex Stout was writing at the same time as Christie and he is my favorite of all. Rex Stout died in 1975, Agatha Christie died in 1976.
The Murder of Roger Aykroyd seems to be her most highly thought of book from the comments I've seen over the years and what critics have had to say about it. I'm definitely going to be reading more of her work this year, hopefully several more, in hopes that my enthusiasm grows. I do have a hard time understanding why characters like Marple or Poirot would enter the story so late. That had to make them slower and more difficult to develop, but it apparently didn't really much bother anyone considering how popular those two characters still are today.
DeleteThat long chapter at the end in which everything was reviewed, and some unknowable stuff thrown into the mix, bugs me a lot, though. Like you, I find myself automatically thinking less of a novel at the very last moment when that happens. That was a big disappointment to me here.
Still haven't gotten to Allingham, but I hope to do so soon. Stout is one of my favorites from that period, if not my very favorite now that I think about it. Funny, though, that I don't think of Stout and Christie being contemporaries. That makes no sense, but Stout's books just seem to be more modern for some reason.
I have had similar thoughts about the Miss Marple novels. They are inconsistent in that she plays a large part in some books (and drives the investigation) and others she comes in at the end and cleans up. An example of the first type is 4.50 from Paddington (Alternate title: What Mrs McGillicuddy Saw).
ReplyDeleteThat's good information to have, Tracy. I don't know why that was, really, because it seems like a waste of a great lead character.
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