Marple: The Jade Empress

/ Alex Good

A slow boat to China (or Hong Kong, which wasn’t quite the same thing at the time) isn’t where you’d expect to find Miss Marple, but aside from the setting Jean Kwok’s pastiche is well grounded and plays out in a familiar manner.

On the ship Miss Marple strikes up a friendship with a Chinese man who is returning to Hong Kong to visit his son. The man is soon found murdered in his cabin. The list of suspects is quite short (this is a short story), with the most prominent and suspicious-seeming being the man’s daughter. So we can feel pretty sure she’s in the clear. And the old man’s nurse with the one bad eye is a little too obvious as well. Which leaves the gossipy English couple, and while they’re obvious too they’re also very un-PC in a casually racist sort of way so you can’t count them out.

This throws us back on the one big clue or reveal scene, which I was happy to have interpreted correctly, having read more than a few of them in my time. I didn’t think the murder made a whole lot of sense, but in Kwok’s defence it held together a bit better than most of Christie’s plots. I haven’t read many successful Marple pastiches, but this one can at least be described as comfortable.

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