In my notes on the first two Miss Marple novels, The Murder at the Vicarage and The Body in the Library, I’ve mentioned how Miss Marple herself remains a secondary figure, knitting in the background and not playing a significant role in the plot or really doing much of anything until the big reveal at the end. Well, that gets doubled-down on here, as The Moving Finger is a 164-page novel in the edition I was reading and Miss Marple doesn’t appear, indeed isn’t mentioned, until page 117. At which point she promptly solves the case, explaining everything in the denouement. She works fast!

But then, as she points out at the beginning of her wrap-up, this was an easy case: “Most crimes, you see, are so absurdly simple. This one was. Quite sane and straightforward – and quite understandable – in an unpleasant way, of course.” There are all the usual distractions – a long list of suspects, a complicated timeline – but what it comes down to, again, is the question of motive. I didn’t figure out exactly how the killer did it, or pick up all the breadcrumbs of clues that Miss Marple did, but I had a strong hunch whodunit that turned out to be correct.

Things kick off with amateur pilot Jerry Burton recovering from a crash in the sleepy country village of Lymstock with his sister Joanna. They’ve rented a house with the too-cozy name of Little Furze and settled in for some quiet convalescence. Unfortunately, as soon as they arrive Lymstock starts suffering from a plague of poison-pen letters, including some addressed to Jerry and Joanna. It seems Lymstock has its very own proto-troll. You know why people write nasty anonymous letters, or insult people on comment threads? It’s because “they’ve got a screw loose. It satisfies some urge, I suppose. If you’ve been snubbed, or ignored, or frustrated, and your life’s pretty drab and empty, I suppose you get a sense of power from stabbing in the dark at people who are happy and enjoying themselves.”

Then one of the addressees dies of an apparent suicide and her serving girl is later murdered in a particularly (for Christie) horrific way: knocked unconscious with a blow to the back of the head and then having a kitchen skewer thrust in the base of her skull. That’s mean! We all know poison is the weapon of choice for cozy killers.

If you were familiar with the plot of The A.B.C. Murders, which came out six years earlier, you’d be able to guess what was going on with the letters, though you’d be no closer to identifying the killer. I won’t add more about that, but only sum up by saying that while the mystery here isn’t first-rate, the book is a good read (and one of Christie’s own favourites) just because the characters are so enjoyable. When Jerry falls for the village tomboy Megan (spunky enough to defend Goneril and Regan against their mean dad, and young enough to almost be Jerry’s daughter) it plays very much like a modern rom-com, especially when he literally whisks her off her feet and takes her to London to dress her up. You can’t help but be reminded of the clichéd scenes in the teen rom-coms where the guy takes the girl’s glasses off and reveals her to be a princess. Even her “freckles are so earnest and Scottish.” I was puzzled, however, at one of the descriptions of Megan in frumpy mode: “She slouched out of the room. She was untidily dressed as usual and there were potatoes in both heels.” Does this mean she actually had potatoes in her shoes, which I’ve heard is a method used to stretch out shoes that are too small or uncomfortably tight, or is it a figure of speech for something else? I suspect I’m missing another archaic Britishism.

In any event, it doesn’t take long for Jerry to fall head-over-heels in love when he realizes that Megan is, indeed, a keeper.

What a nice child she was, I thought. So pleased with everything, so unquestioning, accepting all my suggestions without fuss or bother.

Grab hold of that young woman and don’t let her go, Jerry!

Even a backwater like Lymstock is dominated by certain roles and conventions. It’s assumed, for example, that the letter writer must be a woman of high social position. Don’t ask why. But the one gay man might qualify because he’s “got an abnormally female streak in his character.” Which is as close as Christie is going to come here to calling someone gay. And as for being of high social position, that sort of goes without saying in a world where the lower classes are all but invisible. Jerry at one point is surprised to hear the house servant mention the name of the Daily Woman (capitalized): “For a fortnight now, I had been conscious of a middle-aged woman with wisps of grey hair, usually on her knees retreating crablike from bathroom and stairs and passage when I appeared.” They’d better retreat! What if you were to trip over them?

So Lymstock is a cozy place, aside from the odd skewer to the brain stem. And I’ll confess I find something endearing about relationships based on companionship rather than sexual attraction being presented as the ideal. In fact, you can usually tell who the good people are in a Christie book by the nature of their relationships. Companionship, not far removed from the brother-sister pairings we have a couple of instances of here, is the goal, and spells a happy life. Anything more physical is likely to be dangerous. SA (sex appeal) is always a red flag.

In the best romantic tradition the ending wraps things up with all the good people marrying off, ensuring a future of domestic tranquility, but there is a truly shocking bit at the end I didn’t know what to make of. The old lady that Jerry had been renting Little Furze from says to him on the final page: “I really do think, don’t you, that everything turned out for the best?” (the emphasis on best is in the original). He considers this, and keep in mind that Mrs. Symmington is the woman who was poisoned and Agnes the serving girl who gets her brain skewered:

Just for a fleeting moment I thought of Mrs. Symmington and Agnes Woddell in their graves in the churchyard and wondered if they would agree, and then I remembered that Agnes’s boy hadn’t been very fond of her and that Mrs. Symmington hadn’t been very nice to Megan and, what the hell? we’ve all got to die sometime! And I agree with happy Miss Emily that everything was for the best in the best of possible worlds.

What with the echo of Candide I’m sure the intent here was black comedy, Christie poking fun at the idea of murder mysteries having happy endings. But it was still kind of shocking. The moral of the story seems to be that if you want to live a cozy life there are a lot of bad things you’re just going to have to ignore or at least find your peace with.

Marple index

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.

Marple index