In my notes on A Murder is Announced I talked about how hard it was to think of it as being set in the 1950s. Christie’s own mental outlook on life crystallized in the 1930s and her cozy mysteries harken even further back. The buildings in the village of Chipping Cleghorn seem “done round about in Victorian times,” and Miss Marple (in “Miss Marple Tells a Story”) describes herself as “hopelessly Victorian.” Victorian is an adjective that’s used again to describe Miss Marple in this story, though in a slightly unexpected way (when she gets excited she’s said to respond with “Victorian gusto”). But “Strange Jest” came out in 1941 in the U.S. and ’44 in the UK, the delay presumably being due to the fact there was a war going on at the time.

There’s no mention of the war here, but only a mystery possibly involving an inheritance that takes the form of a buried treasure, like something out of Treasure Island (published 1883). And the main clues are drawn from the Victorian era as well, with letters seeming to have been mailed from the 1850s and a reference to “gammon and spinach.” This latter meant nothing at all to me (sort of like “hundreds and thousands”), but it is, or was, a slang expression for nonsense, its usage dating back to Dickens’s David Copperfield (published 1850). I think you might have to be a Victorian relic yourself to have picked up on that.

I thought of this story as a clever homage to Poe’s “The Purloined Letter,” with the amateur detectives tearing the property apart to find something (a letter, as it turns out) whose meaning is hiding in plain sight. “There’s really no need to make it all so difficult,” Miss Marple tells the treasure hunters. And once again we have an ending where the young lovers are set nicely on their way in the best comic style.

Marple index