Quick Review

Nemesis by Agatha Christie
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Another Christie for another day in the airport, bless her.  The reason I so love Miss Marple for this sort of dreary inactivity, the reason in fact that I generally prefer her to the more active Poirot or Tommy and Tuppence for that matter, is her own rather leisurely way with a murder.  Poirot, for all his buzzing about, never seems to prevent that inevitable next horror.  Neither does Jane Marple, but who can blame the lady?  Poor old thing.  She's doing the very best she can, isn't she? She's quite old, you know.  Not to be rushed.  She should hate to have hurried to quite the wrong conclusion.   Meanwhile, people will insist on murdering one another, won't they?  what's a body to do?  Makes the best of bad situations, does our Jane, which is, after all, very much like sitting in an airport, isn't it?  Most sympathetic.

Here Miss Marple stirs herself a bit more than usual, but then for most of the action, she's actually, as it were, on the job.  She's accepted a challenge, just at the start, and is even looking forward to a payday should she succeed and survive to collect.  What she's agreed to investigate we would now call a "cold case," though this being Christie, the investigation heats up for one or two other poor souls quickly enough.  (Not right to call this novel a sequel, but it does lead off from A Caribbean Mystery, or rather it's a character from that one who commissions  Marple in this one.  Not necessary to have read the former though, I shouldn't think, to read this one.)  The best of the puzzle here is that the old girl doesn't know to start what she's to look for, or who's dead, if anyone is, or why, etc.  Here's a mystery from scratch.  Great fun, that.

There's always a moment or two, just near the end in the best sort of whodunit when  the reader is allowed to feel awfully clever for seeing what's to come.  There's never been anybody better than Christie at providing this most satisfying glimpse without entirely giving the game away.  There's always a bit more to it, some detail to be played out, some twist and usually some peril to be survived before the whole business is unraveled.  my favorite bit, every time, that crack in the case.  Doesn't matter that I know by now that it's a trick, that I'm not actually all that clever, not really any good at puzzles even.  When I see the killer clear, just before the killer's caught, I'm left feeling quite insufferably smug for a minute or two.  How is that still possible, at my age?

Well, it's possible, even perfectly predictable because Christie made it so.  Everything she did, everything of hers that I've read anyway, works and works in a way that only a true master can make. Yes, the familiar tick tock is both soothing and occasionally annoying, and yes the inevitably unforeseen collateral damage might have been prevented in a better world, and yes there is an implausibility to the whole contraption, but whatever there may be in this business that may seem dated, dim or plain daft, once it's wound, it runs.  The craftsmanship, do admit, is still exquisite and the whole thing simply hums with the pleasure of ingenuity and a knowing, almost prudish naughtiness.  (Everyone in these things is always disapproving of sex and violence and the disgraceful moral laxity of the times, even as the secret lovers are discovered, the poor girls are undressed and the corpses pile up like cordwood.  Having one's cake, right there.)

And finally, there is something to be said for "a silly old woman," in preference nearly anyone else, trapping the bad'uns.  Miss Marple allows for frailty, and even a nap or two, but as she herself might put it, she is never the less "inexorable."  One wants that in a retributive incarnation, don't you find?  Indeed.


View all my reviews