Marple: A Christmas Tragedy

/ Alex Good

Sir Henry is upset that the menfolk are telling all the stories at the group’s get-togethers, so Miss Marple herself has to step up with a mystery that took place at a Hydro. “Do you mean a seaplane?” one of the guests asks, “with wide eyes.” No, not a seaplane. A Hydro is apparently what Brits at the time called a spa, the kind of place where they might take a water cure. Or something like that.

In any event, I didn’t like the mystery here at all. It was ridiculous (or “incredible,” as Dr. Lloyd puts it), involving the usual complicated staging that it’s impossible to credit for a minute. The only interesting element was the way Miss Marple misleads her audience in her telling of the story, leading them to expect one thing, then seeming to deny it, and finally showing that she was actually right in her suspicions all along. It only took her a while to prove it.

A Christmas tragedy? Maybe not. Maybe the victim was lucky. “Perhaps it was better for her to die while life was still happy than it would have been for her to live on, unhappy and disillusioned, in a world that would have seemed suddenly horrible.” Sheesh. I mean, you could probably say that about anybody’s life, at least at some point, but you shouldn’t. It actually reminded me of the end of the novel The Moving Finger, where such sentiments are meant (I’m sure) as a joke. But Miss Marple is no sentimentalist. The killer here ends up being hanged “And a good job to. . . I’ve no patience with modern humanitarian scruples about capital punishment.” Just because they call these cozies doesn’t mean they’re soft-hearted. Order must be maintained.

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20 thoughts on “Marple: A Christmas Tragedy”

  1. ‘Order must be maintained.’

    Who sponsors the AI who writes this? Such authoritarian sentiments. Just because your church coffee morning group made you bin your VHS of Liquid Sky before the good bits. Think you need a stay in a hydro to recharge.

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