Tag: amateur detectives

Classics, detective, mystery, Series I love

Classic Mystery Series: Miss Marple

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In honour of the new Miss Marple continuation by Lucy Foley which came out this week in the US (and at the end of the monht in the UK) this week’s series post is on Agatha Christie’s classic series, which by some mad oversight I haven’t previously written to a series post for. How fortitous for us all

I mean I’m not sure that there is anyone who doesn’t know who Miss Marple is at this point, but just in case there is someone out there and reading this who doesn’t, I will still recap you the set up. Jane Marple is an elderly spinster who lives in the village of St Mary Mead. The first novel that features her isThe Murder at the Vicarage, where an unpopular church warden is found shot dead in the vicar’s study, which is told from the point of view of the vicar, who sees her as just another of the elderly village women – but in reality she is a close observer of human nature and very astute. In this early book she is a little harder and less easy to like than she becomes later in the series – the rest of the village find her nosiness tiresome but as you go through the series she becomes more of the person that people in the village go to when they have a problem that they need to solve – which is closer to the characterisation that you find in the Joan Hickson adaptations if you are familiar with them (which I am very, very familiar with!).

There are 12 novels in the series (and numerous short stories) and with the exclusion of the final book if you read them in order you see Miss Marple ageing and growing more infirm in body (definitely not in mind!) even if the age that she is varies wildly going up and down between books. The exception is Sleeping Murder which was written to be the final story and published posthumously in 1976 but actually written and set in the mid 1940s and so some of the character developments that have occurred over the previous books in the series aren’t there. I was terrified by the cover of the edition of Sleeping Murder my mum had when I was first reading these (aged about 11) which had knitting needles in a woman’s eyes for some reason, and the TV adaptation of it was one of my least favourites and so I hadn’t actually read it for years until this year and actually now I like it a lot more than I did. In fact now I’ve revisited all of them it is considerably higher up my list than it was.

I listened to them all (as you could see from the Week in Books I guess) over the last few months in preparation for reading the Lucy Foley and I think my favourites are The Body in the Library, A Murder is Announced and Nemesis, but it’s hard to decide. I definitely know which ones I like less (The Mirror Crack’d From Side to Side, They Do It With Mirrors and Caribbean Mystery) but because I’ve watched the Joan Hickson adaptations so many times and I have favourites among them it can sometimes be hard to separate the book from the adaptation – even though there are often a fair few differences. But Miss Marple’s shrewd judgement of human nature and ability to find a village parallel remains across it all – and as the times change and the world changes around her, her ability to unflinchingly find the person responsible for a crime makes for a great read.

They remain one of the exemplar series of classic Golden Age mystery and I love them for it.

Book of the Week, cozy crime, detective

Book of the Week: A Farewell to Yarns

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As you could see from the list yesterday, last week was mostly spent reading Mitchell and Markby books, but when I wasn’t reading those, I was reading another murder mystery from the early 1990s and that’s what I’m writing about today. And just to whet your appetite, I’ve got another series of a 1990s vintage coming to you on Friday. It’s like I’ve got a coherant theme happening… oh wait, I have. Two of them. Just you wait until tomorrow…

Anyway, Farewell to Yarns is the second book in a series featuring widowed single mum Jane Jeffry. It’s the run up to Christmas and as well as helping organise a church bazaar she’s got an old friend coming to visit her. Jane hasn’t seen Phyllis in years and surprised by the fact that she suddenly wants to visit her – and then is even more surprised when Phyllis turns up with a bratty son that no one knew she had. And then there’s a body and Jane can’t help but get involved in trying to figure out what happened.

Maybe it’s just the mood I’m in at the moment, but this is another really easy to read and fun (if you know what I mean) cozy murder mystery. It’s not long, but the plot is clever if slightly outlandish in places, but that doesn’t matter because if you were going to rule out slightly bonkers things in books you’d never read any cozy crime at all! Think of all those small towns with insanely high murder rates and small businesses continuing to thrive even though their owners keep stumbling across bodies on the premises. I haven’t read the first book in the series, but it didn’t matter at all because any background you need is explained in this – and it’s only the second book in the series so there aren’t too many running plots that you need to get your head around anyway.

This one is going to be harder to get hold of – I bought my copy (and another in the series) in the second hand bookshop at Baddesley Clinton and it’s not available on Kindle. But Amazon and Abebooks have copies and sensible prices, and I’m hoping that I might be able to pick up a few more in the series if I keep my eyes peeled!

Happy Reading

Book of the Week, books, detective

Book of the Week: Murder of a Lady

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This week I’m back with a murder mystery – and another British Library Crime Classic – after a run of more than a month without one! This time it’s an impossible murder in the a Highlands by Anthony Wynne.

The murdered lady of the title is Mary Gregor, the sister of the laird of Duchlan, who is found stabbed to death locked in her bedroom of the family castle. Our amateur sleuth is Dr Eustace Hailey, who is in the grand tradition of the Golden Age mystery, and who happens to be staying nearby when the body is discovered. Despite being told that the victim was a kind and charitable woman, he soon uncovers evidence that suggests the reverse and that the situation at the castle was not a happy one. In fact even after her death, Mary Gregor still seems to loom over the building – and then more deaths happen.

This is definitely one of the more fantastical of the BLCC’s I’ve read, with a strong vein of highland superstition and mysticism. In fact there was a while when I was wondering is the solution was going to involve the supernatural so impossible did it seem for anyone to have carried out the crime. But it does stick to the rules of the detective club – although the solution is quite something, it is just about plausible.

I bought my copy at the Book Conference second hand sale, but this is also available on Kindle and Kobo and is actually pretty bargainous at £1.99 as I write this, although it should be noted that the ebook edition isn’t a BLCC one (there are some of these where the paperback and ebook rights appear to have got separated) so I can’t vouch for the quality of the ebook version. And if you want more impossible/locked room mysteries, I have a post for that too.

Happy Reading!