“Another locomotive one – murder seen as two trains pass each other in the same direction. Later settles down into a good old family murder. Contains one of Christie’s few sympathetic independent women. Miss Marple apparently solves the crime by divine guidance, for there is very little in the way of clues or logical deduction.”          Robert Barnard, A Talent to Deceive

4:50 from Paddington is the fourth and final Miss Marple title of the 1950’s. and if that fails to impress beside the fact that Hercule Poirot’s Christmas was the twelfth appearance of the Belgian sleuth in a seven-year span during the 1930’s, it affords great pleasure to all of us Marple fans. (I mean, there were only twelve Miss Marple novels altogether!) Of course, there’s a bigger difference here than the mere exchange of sleuths. The run of Poirots contains some of Christie’s best overall books and richest puzzle plots: Peril at End House, Murder on the Orient Express, The A.B.C. Murders, Cards on the Table, Death on the Nile), while the Marples of the 50’s exemplify the laxity with which the author began to approach clueing in general. 

A Murder Is Announced contains, by far, the best puzzle plot of the four, but it shares with They Do It with Mirrors the same basic subterfuge: a murderer creates a false target victim in order to divert the police from a motive that will give the whole game away. Poirot had tackled a similar situation two decades earlier, and fans of that particular novel may have a harder time fully enjoying the Marples – at least for their puzzle element. At least A Murder Is Announced contains some marvelous clues, something that cannot be said for Mirrors. What AMIA also contains that will be the hallmark of future Marples is emotional resonance and wit. Generally speaking, Christie grew funnier in the 50’s, one of the qualities to which, along with characterization and social commentary, we will cling when the mystery itself is not up to her usual standards.

A Pocket Full of Rye is not a good puzzle mystery, but it is a highly enjoyable read that looks like a good puzzle mystery. And 4:50 from Paddington, which brings us two-thirds of the way through the Marple oeuvre, is outwardly similar. And yet we cannot dismiss this novel as another pleasant read because it does have some points of interest, particularly where Miss Marple is concerned. Normally, the good lady becomes involved by insinuating herself into an existing case as a neighbor or a visitor; here, Miss Marple is the instigator. and controlling the investigation from start to finish, albeit mostly from afar. Lucy Eyelesbarrow and Dermot Craddock may be her eyes and legs, but she controls their actions – and those of her friend, Mrs. McGillicuddy – to expose a murderer who would have certainly gotten away with it had Miss Marple not gotten the ball rolling.

And while the bulk of Paddington is lacking in clues, Barnard’s snarky comment about “divine guidance” leading the sleuth to her solution is not entirely fair. The opening chapters of the book read like an amateur procedural with “Inspector” Marple at the helm. Once the plot settles at Rutherford Hall, she reverts to her more usual position in terms of presence, but even then she is calling the shots. She may not be the “Nemesis” who emerged in Rye and who we will see more of toward the end of her career, but she is a fierce proponent of justice for the dead and – given that she can never seem to come up with enough evidence to convict – as tricky as ever. 

And may I also say that the book is delightful and much more fun to read than the two Poirot mysteries that immediately precede it (Hickory Dickory Dock and Dead Man’s Folly). Much of this has to do with the utter delight that is Lucy Eyelesbarrow, but Christie also manages to deal with the effects of the war on British families and their houses, and especially on the “lost boys” like Bryan Eastley, whom biographer Laura Thompson describes, along with other characters “created by Agatha after 1945 . . . (who) all have something of Archie in them; they all knew what it was like to sleep and wake with death, to live with it as intimately as with a wife, then come home to a world that expects them to return, gratefully, to their former selves. By then Agatha understood the terrible energy that these men carried with them.”

This re-read gave me the chance to learn a few facts and come to terms with a hard truth: 

* There is no 4:50 train from Paddington; the closest we get is the 4:54. Christie chose aesthetics over accuracy in her title. (But then, the American title What Mrs. McGillicuddy Saw is, for once, infinitely superior!);

* Christie was going to have Mrs. Bantry see the murder on the train, but changed her mind; I think this was a good idea;

* As much as I hate to accept this, Christie’s notes state quite clearly that it is Cedric who wins the hand of Lucy Eyelesbarrow, and a re-read of their scenes together certainly confirms this. I’m so sorry, Dermot . . . 

With those matters settled, let’s begin. 

*     *     *     *     *

The Hook

“’A woman has been strangled,’ she said. ‘In a train that has just passed. I saw it.’                                      “’You don’t think, Madam, that you may have had a little nap and – er –‘ he broke off tactfully.   “’I have had a nap, but if you think this was a dream, you’re quite wrong. I saw it, I tell you.’”

The first five chapters of the book rank with the best of Christie. We find ourselves firmly in Freeman Wills Crofts train-timetable territory – if Inspector French were an 80-year-old woman and her sergeant a Scottish lady named Elspeth. The inciting incident is so wonderful that when they decided to create a Miss Marple movie for Margaret Rutherford, they turned to this book – and then abandoned the Miss Marple novels altogether in future sequels (although there’s a bit of a They Do It with Mirrors vibe in Murder Ahoy.) Elspeth McGillicuddy – short, stout, practical and penurious – is a wonderful cameo, providing both the inciting incident and the punchline to Miss Marple’s latest trap to catch yet another killer who has left behind no evidence. 

In fact, Mrs. McGillicuddy looks just like – Margaret Rutherford! You can understand why when the first adaptation was filmed in 1961, the character was dropped and Miss Marple took the train ride herself. Losing both Elspeth and Lucy to accommodate the specific talents of the film’s star is understandable, but it relegates the adaptation to B- status and makes Agatha Christie’s antipathy for the film, and for Rutherford’s performance, perfectly understandable. 

Once Mrs. McGillicuddy appears at her friend Jane Marple’s door, we are treated to a procedural run by women who use multiple methods –trips to and from London at different times of day, the solicitation of information from “experts” (the neighbor’s son and the nephew’s oldest boy) – to gather information. Later, Miss Marple’s proxy will continue in this vein, masking her investigation under the guise of “women’s work.” This is one of the purest passages in the canon that illustrates, from her point of view, Miss Marple’s methodology at work. More than Poirot who travels the world solving crimes, more than the Beresfords who dabble almost purely in espionage, Miss Marple’s oeuvre is wholly domestic. She concerns herself with families and their problems: how Colonel Protheroe poisons his family’s happiness; who will inherit Conway Jefferson’s money; the dysfunction underlying the Symmington family; the unhappy early lives of Helen Kennedy and Charlotte Blacklock; the many marriages of Carrie-Louise. The basic of our sleuth’s success lies in her understanding of domestic relationships and practices; in Paddington, we get fewer mysterious village parallels and more practical detection – and it’s marvelous.

Score: 10/10

The Closed Circle: Who, What, When, Where, Why?

Who? 

There’s no getting around the fact that most of the male characters here are retreads of earlier Christie men, and while it‘s fascinating to examine the author’s technique of redefining and realigning them into a new cast, I can’t say that any of them improve on earlier examples. Harold Crackenthorpe is essentially identical to Percival Fortescue (A Pocketful of Rye), and his brother Alfred is a version of Lance Fortescue, if Lance possessed half the charm or success at his shady endeavors. Both of them are essentially minor characters, dangled as suspects and then poisoned off. Cedric Crackenthorpe, the bohemian artist, is a sort of Amyas Crale Lite. I never liked Cedric when I was younger because it seemed to me – based, I must admit, on Miss Marple’s final line to Dermot Craddock – that Lucy was destined to marry the Inspector! But if you read the scenes between Lucy and Cedric, the foundation for their future coupling is clearly laid and is amusing. Finally, Dr. Roberts, er, Rendell, sorry Quimper brings nothing new to the bluff, hearty medical killer that ran through Christie’s career. 

All is not lost in the men’s department, however. Luther Crackenthorpe is a delight: a penurious crab who despises his sons, perhaps in honor of his own father having all but disinherited him. Unlike a true monster like Simeon Lee (whose own family includes other mirror images of Cedric, Harold and Alfred), Luther turns out to be a sentimentalist and a faded roue who actually proposes to Lucy! But then, so do they all! Bryan Eastly, as I mentioned above is the pathetic Monty Miller/Archie Christie figure found so often in the canon. Inspector Bacon speaks for the author when he describes Bryan:

“I’ve run into one or two of his type. They’re what you might call adrift in the world – had danger and death and excitement too early in life. Now they find it tame. Tame and unsatisfactory. In a way, we’ve given them a raw deal. Though I don’t really know what we could do about it. But there they are, all past and no future, so to speak. And they’re the kind that don’t mind taking chances. The ordinary fellow plays safe by instinct, it’s not so much morality as prudence. But these fellows aren’t afraid – playing safe isn’t really in their vocabulary.” 

Lucy sees it, too: “He reminded her of the innumerable young pilots she had known during the war, when she had been at the impressionable age of fourteen. She had gone on and grown up into a postwar world – but she felt as though Bryan had not gone on but had been overtaken the passage of years.” She observes Bryan’s relationship to his son, amateur sleuth Alexander (another fantastic Christie kid) and notes how their positions as parent and child seem to be reversed. No wonder the handsome Bryan stands no chance with Lucy. 

Which brings us to the women. Given that Christie establishes from the start at the murderer is a man, the fact that they all basically look and act alike makes sense, making it even easier for the female characters, as usual, to shine. Bear with me if I inject my own interpretation here, but I can’t help seeing, in the conglomeration of Emma Crackenthorpe and Lucy Eyelesbarrow, an idealized self-portrait of the author herself. Emma may be plain, even ordinary, but Inspector Craddock sees in her something approaching the domestic ideal:

“A quiet woman. Not stupid. Not brilliant, either. One of those comfortable, pleasant women whom men were inclined to take for granted, and who had the art of making a house into a home, giving it an atmosphere of restfulness and quiet harmony.”

(Note: when I was a kid and thought myself very clever, I believed that Emma was the killer, that she had dressed in male drag, and that she had murdered the woman for some mysterious reason. This was the best surprise ending I could come up with for this novel, and I maintain that it’s probably as good as solution, if not better, than having Dr. Armstrong, er, Gale, sorry, Quimper be the killer.)

Interestingly, Lucy, possessing the brilliant education that Emma and Agatha both lacked, chooses of all things to become the best and most sought-after domestic in England. She is the angelic alternative to that nearly-as-fascinating devil Mary Dove from Rye, and her perception and people skills endear her to the other characters and the reader. She’s also a great detective in her own right. In my version of the Christie-verse, she would marry Craddock, and Christie would have written a series of books about this case-cracking team that would have had fans muttering, “Tommy and Tuppence who?” Instead, she’s headed to Ibiza to keep house for a wannabe Gauguin! It’s a crying shame!!

What? 

Once the family gathers together for the inquest, things proceed in a style much more typical of a Miss Marple novel. The shift from a Marple-centered procedural to a traditional closed circle family mystery feels like we’re reading two side-by-side novellas. Craddock assumes command and interrogates the suspects. Miss Marple resorts to cameo appearances, but these are delightful, whether she comes to tea at Rutherford Hall or her associates come visit her at her temporary lodgings with “Faithful Florence.” Back at home, Lucy fends off Crackenthorpe passes right and left in a section that delightfully reads like screwball comedy. (The scene where old Luther calls Lucy “a spirited young filly” and tries to lure her into marriage by showing off his hoardings is too charming to be creepy.) More murderous mayhem ensues, resulting in forty percent of the suspect list getting bumped off. The mystery of the victim’s identity sputters along, quickly narrowed down to two women for no discernible reason. Then the mystery of what happened to Martine is handed to everyone in a rather dissatisfying manner. Things pick up at the end when Mrs. McGillicuddy returns from abroad and she and Miss Marple come to Rutherford Hall for fish sandwiches and finagling, where the murderer – cool as a cucumber up to this point – calls Miss Marple a “devilish old hag” and confesses.

When and where? 

I could find nothing in any of my resources to explain whether Rutherford Hall was a stand-in for one of Christie’s own houses, but I couldn’t help thinking of Ashford, her childhood home – especially late Ashford when Christie’s mother was wandering alone through junk-filled rooms, and Christie had to come over to clear things out. Still, the house provides a nice contrast to other postwar mansions from other 50’s novels: Enderby Hall (After the Funeral) is in better shape but will probably be sold off to become a hostel (like the house next door in Dead Man’s Folly), while Yewtree Lodge has been tastelessly remodeled by the nouveau riche owners. It speaks to Luther Crackenthorpe’s strength of will, or his bitterness, that he won’t give up his landed gentry status even as a bustling town rises around his estate. More than the other houses I’ve mentioned, the Hall and its environs come to life on the page, thanks to Lucy’s insightful eye as she investigates. It enriches a murder plot that in other ways feels a bit too much by-the-numbers.

This feeling isn’t helped by Christie’s shaky handling of the victim’s identity. John Curran describes it thusly:

“But the biggest problem about 4:50 from Paddington is the identity of the corpse: It is a  problem for Miss Marple, the police, the reader and, I suspect, for Agatha Christie herself. We do not know for certain until the novel’s closing pages whose murder is actually under investigation. And it must be admitted that it makes what would otherwise have been a Grade A Christie novel, something of a disappointment.”

How lucky we are that Curran got his hands on those notebooks, for it provides so much insight into how Christie’s mind worked. And here we see that sometimes even Christie wasn’t sure, as the notes for Paddington express her own uncertainty over whether the victim will turn out to be Martine or Anna Stravinska. The most important point to take away here is that either choice necessitates a different murderer. Christie’s uncertainty over who-got-dun-in goes far to explain our relative lack of interest here over whodunnit. 

Score: 6/10 (really five but I’m giving a whole extra point for Lucy Eyelesbarrow)

The Solution and How She Gets There (10 points)

“I am really very, very glad that they haven’t abolished capital punishment yet because I do feel that if there is anyone who ought to hang, it’s Doctor Quimper.’”

Dr. Quimper has got to be the clunkiest and most unlucky murdering medico in the canon. He clearly has the overweening vanity possessed by so many of Christie’s murderers. He plans on marrying Emma and controlling her fortune by killing off his present wife, then Emma’s father and brothers. Clunky. And there’s no clear evidence that Emma would even marry Quimper in the end. Vanity! (If the idea that Quimper kills his estranged wife because of her Catholic antipathy for divorce sounds familiar, that’s because it is used to much better effect in an early Poirot mystery.) He tries to lead the police astray by sending a letter purportedly by Martine that will incriminate a family member – although if Quimper were to marry Emma he would have the same motive as her brothers for getting rid of Martine.

Once Miss Marple is ensconced with Faithful Florence, the procedural is dropped and the old lady trades actual detection for her usual, slightly miraculous insight, ostensibly based on her knowledge of human nature. Craddock seems unusually dependent on her guidance. He’s not dumb: the idea of searching for missing members of theatrical troupes should have come to his mind as well. Mostly though, Miss Marple is assisted by Quimper’s own horrible luck: how could he have known that Martine live right down the road. It’s a ludicrous coincidence, although the reveal is a lot of fun to read. And once it happens, there’s really nowhere else to look for a man with close ties to Rutherford Hall than the doctor. Thus, the revelation that Quimper is the killer may not quite spring from divine guidance, but it doesn’t make for a satisfying puzzle mystery. 

I will say, however, that if we have to witness Miss Marple trick a killer into confessing, the climax of Paddington is far more satisfying than the mimicry displayed by our heroine at the end A Murder Is Announced. Choking on a chicken bone is such a little-old-lady thing to do, and Miss Marple is firmly in charge of that scene, both in anticipating Mrs. McGillicuddy’s reaction and then nipping her friend in the bud before her honesty spoils things. 

In my analysis of A Pocket Full of Rye, I gave this a score of six. I agree that there’s still too much “divine guidance” in the detection here, but the early section is so much better that I have to score a bit higher.

Score: 6/10

The Marple Factor

“The garden is not looking at all as it should . . . Dr. Haydock has absolutely forbidden me to do any stooping or kneeling – and really, what can you do if you don’t stoop or kneel?”

What, indeed? Since The Murder at the Vicarage, we have witnessed how Miss Marple uses her horticultural interests to pursue vital knowledge, witness important events, and simply to be in the right place at the right time. (And here may I just say that I feel particularly vindicated placing my analysis of Sleeping Murder when I did: Miss Marple’s vigorous applications to the Reeds’ vast garden allows her to pump witnesses, save Gwenda’s life and wreak havoc on the bindweed! Clearly, it is a younger version of the character whom we meet in that novel.) 

As encroaching rheumatism limits her ability to tend to her flowers and be a more physical sleuth, Miss Marple has to create other options for investigating Rutherford Hall. Before that, however, we get perhaps her best run of sleuthing as she takes Mrs. McGillicuddy’s story and runs with it. It is to the credit of Sergeant Frank Cornish of the St. Mary Mead constabulary that when the ladies report their story to him, he turns it around and asks Miss Marple her opinion. What follows is a highly logical consideration of what must have happened. The murder that Mrs. McGillicuddy described as having witnessed certainly seems like a crime of passion, and Miss Marple reasons that the killer would have not had the time to plan for a reasonable disposal of the body. This leaves two possibilities: leave the corpse on the train or toss her onto the tracks. And since neither of these things has happened, Miss Marple must give way to what she acknowledges both the police and her friend lack: a healthy imagination. 

The old lady marshals her forces: Sir Henry Clithering and his nephew Dermot Craddock representing the law, and her nephew David West and Reverend Clements’ son Leonard, who possess knowledge about trains and maps respectively. She takes a train ride to visit the vicinity of the crime and notes how the train curves. 

As a result, the good news is that we get Lucy Eyelesbarrow to stand in for the elderly lady in the early stages of investigating Rutherford Hall. Miss Marple could not have found the body in the same manner as Lucy. (Margaret Rutherford could – making Christie’s antipathy toward her performance even more reasonable.) And this does not absent Miss Marple from the investigation. Her personality dominates in Florence’s parlor and during her visits to tea at Rutherford Hall where she both puts the Crackenthorpe men firmly in their place and catches a murderer. 

Thus, even though Inspector Craddock dominates the proceedings once he enters, Miss Marple is present and essential from start to finish. Despite her frequent absences midway, she is the star throughout. 

Score: 8/10

The Wow Factor

By now it’s abundantly clear that if we apply the high standards Christie set for herself as a puzzle maker equally to the Poirot and Miss Marple books, the Belgian leaves the spinster in the dust. And yet . . . well, my friend Scott put it so well in the comments to our last ranking, saying that while 

“. . . the Poirot novels yielded more classics . . . yet I prefer Miss Marple over Poirot as the protagonist. The idea of an unassuming, elderly spinster, who can run circles around her police detectives, is something that continues to draw me to the Marple stories.” 

If I may spring to a conclusion from Scott’s comment, it’s Miss Marple herself who is the “wow factor” of her novels. Biographers and critics tend to gloss over the plots of these books (“another locomotive one,” says Robert Barnard dismissively) and focus on whatever interests them about the non-plot related insights they contain. I am fascinated with how Christie, who wrote the majority of the Marple books roughly between the ages of 60 and 80, used her three main detective series so differently in terms of how she aged her sleuths and used them as social commentary. Say what you will about how Christie felt about Poirot, he was her star and he featured in over half her writings. But he remained a fairly static creature until the final book: his main ailment as he aged was the fading of his reputation rather than his body or mind, giving him with each case he solved the opportunity to show up the the younger generation who thought he was a famous hairdresser. As for Tommy and Tuppence Beresford . . . they aged more realistically than any other characters in the canon. To my mind, they gave Christie a chance to daydream of what might have happened had she and Archie remained a perfectly happy couple for fifty years. 

In many ways, Miss Marple is the most realistic detective in the canon. As was right and proper with GAD detectives, the focus on the sleuth centered on their sleuthing and not on their private lives. And yet, Christie gave us glimpses into Miss Marple’s world, allowing us to watch younger friends grow old and older friends die. Through Miss Marple’s observations, we get a sense of how Christie herself viewed the changing post-war world around her. Most important, time and again, Miss Marple embodies the value of age, both in terms of what it brings to the individual and how it benefits society. Christie doesn’t shy away from the deficits: bit by bit, Miss Marple is losing her ability to tend to her beloved garden, and her memory will betray her more and more; sadder still is the way aging renders one more and more invisible in our youth-obsessed society and makes you prone to people underestimating or downright dismissing you. Leave it to Miss Marple to find the benefits of this and to use them to exact justice. If not for her, nobody would have believed Mrs. McGillicuddy, and Dr. Quimper would have gotten away with murder. So would Charlotte Blacklock and Richard Symmington, Josie Turner and Mark Gaskill, Anne Protheroe and Lawrence Redding. A pink-cheeked old lady draped in lace fichu vanquished them all, saved the lives of Mr. Hawes, Jefferson Cope, Megan Hunter, and Mitzi the maid, (with more to come), and broke up several marriages between perfectly lovely women and cold-blooded murderers. 

On September 26, 1961, four years after the novel’s publication (and eleven days after Christie’s birthday), Murder She Said premiered and introduced audiences to Margaret Rutherford’s version of Miss Marple. It was nothing like the woman in the novel, but audiences latched onto this comical figure, and three sequels were made. There had been eight novels written about the elderly sleuth, but this film was the only one actually adapted from a Miss Marple story. And although there is no Mrs. McGillicuddy or Lucy Eyelesbarrow –  because having Margaret Rutherford see the murder and don a maid’s outfit to clean up Rutherford Hall gave the actress the star part she deserved – the film hews pretty closely to the original. 

And then there is a little extra “wow,” for in the film’s cast, playing Mrs. Kidder the housekeeper, was an actress who had earlier played Miss Pryce in the original London company of Appointment with Death. There she had so impressed the playwright that Christie had written a note to her saying, “I hope one day you will play my dear Miss Marple.” 

That woman, of course, was Joan Hickson.

Score: 6/10

FINAL SCORE FOR 4:50 FROM PADDINGTON:  36/50

*     *     *     *     *

We are now two-thirds of the way through our Ranking Marple project, and here are the results so far: 

1. A Murder Is Announced (45 points)
2. Murder at the Vicarage (41 points)
3. The Body in the Library (38 points)
4. The Moving Finger (37 points)
5. 4:50 from Paddington (36 points)
6. A Pocket Full of Rye (34 points)
7. They Do It with Mirrors (30 points)
8. Sleeping Murder (29 points)