It’s the turn of Dr. Pender, “the elderly clergyman of the parish,” to tell a mystery story to the Tuesday Night Club, and he comes through with a preposterous tale about a house party that goes wrong when a guest, “one of the notorious beauties of the Season,” takes on the persona of the goddess Astarte and strikes the host dead.

There’s a video I remember watching a while ago that had the magician Penn Jillette explaining various magic tricks seen in movies, and when remarking on the transportation booth in The Prestige he says that it’s a bad trick if there’s only one way it could be done. Which is basically the same idea as Holmes’s famous dictum that “When you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” Such an approach made solving the mystery here pretty straightforward, as the various attempts at an explanation put forward by the Club members (a javelin, “mass hypnotism,” etc.) are absurd. So pretty much what you think happened at first is in fact what happened. Miss Marple comes to the right conclusion precisely by not indulging her imagination, and cutting everyone else off short by saying “Of course there is only one way poor Sir Richard could have been stabbed.” I think in one of Christie’s novels she would have indulged something a little (or a lot) more improbable, but in a short story there’s no time for that so the obvious solution had to be the correct one as well.

The retired police commissioner also manages to identify the killer’s real identity despite Dr. Pender changing the names in his telling of the story. I thought this an odd note to end on, and it made me wonder if Christie might have had someone specific in mind.

Marple index