As with “The Affair at the Bungalow,” the sense I had here was of Christie having some fun with detective-story conventions. And again she comes up with a clever concept. A village girl has drowned after being pushed off a bridge. The police seem ready to arrest the most likely suspect, but Miss Marple goes to Sir Henry Clithering, Ex-Commissioner of Scotland Yard, and writes the name of who she thinks is the real murderer on a slip of paper that she gives to him. But we don’t find out until the final line of the story whose name she wrote down, and Miss Marple herself only briefly appears a couple of times in the story. Instead we follow Sir Henry around as he questions all the suspects, guided by Miss Marple’s suspicions since, being a veteran of the Tuesday Night Club, he knows she’s always right.

I enjoyed this story and thought it was one of the better Miss Marple mysteries. It goes about its business quickly and there’s a sweet twist at the end. There’s nothing much in the way of clues to follow though, and at the end I was left scratching my head as to the source of Miss Marple’s suspicions in the first place. I guess it just had some connection to a parallel case years ago, but we aren’t given any information. In other words, it seems to have been a pure hunch, even though she protests that “it’s not really that at all.” She knows but can’t explain her “specialized knowledge.” Meanwhile, the obvious suspect is so obvious – a somewhat dandyish modern architect from London described as a “Bolshie” with “no morals” – that the police going after him even strikes Sir Henry as a cliché: “He perceived a strong undercurrent of local prejudice. A new-fangled architect was not likely to be popular in the conservative village of St. Mary Mead.”

As for the Britishisms I like to flag, I took note of the local girl being described as making “a dead seat” at the modish architect. The term I’m used to is “dead set,” meaning focused and determined on a particular outcome, so I wasn’t sure if “dead seat” was a typo. But it might have another meaning. I just couldn’t find any explanation of making a dead seat at someone anywhere I looked.

I also shook my head at Sir Henry, who is staying with the Bantrys, “coming down to breakfast at the pleasant guestly hour of ten-fifteen.” Now I know I get up early, but at 10:15 I’m usually starting to make lunch. If someone was a guest at my house and they only came down at 10:15 I’d be long gone, and they wouldn’t be getting “a plate of kidneys and bacon” either, at any time of day.

Marple index