In the Miss Marple series post earlier in the month, I mentioned that there is a new Miss Marple continuation novel. It’s already out in the US but it comes out on Tuesday coming in the UK so this week I’ve got a bonus review for it because I’ve already read it.
Miss Marple and her friend Dolly Bantry are on holiday at a resort high in the Swiss Alps. Along with a companion to smooth the way for them, they are enjoying the mountain air and watching other people doing winter sports. Among the other guests at the hotel are a politician and his young wife, a blonde bombshell who may be nearing her expiration date for the movie industry and a couple of suspicious characters. When one of the guests at the hotel is found dead in an empty gondola at the top of the ski slopes, Miss Marple can’t help but start trying to work out what happened. In the chronology of the series, this comes sometime after Arthur Bantry has died, but definitely before Caribbean Mystery and I’m going to say also before The Mirror Crack’d* because if it had been after there would definitely have been mention of Marina Gregg in the face of another movie actress.
This is a really interesting continuation to write about because I think that the characters are very true to the original series but the actual writing style and elements of the plot are very different. This is told from multiple points of view and elements that are definitely closer to thrillers, including with action elements. I haven’t read any of Foley’s other novels but I’m assuming that this is her style in them – but with Agatha Christie’s characters. And I enjoyed it and thought that it worked.
I’ve been puzzling about why I liked this and didn’t like the Sophie Irwin Georgette Heyer novel and I think the difference is that Irwin has taking someone else’s characters and writing about them in her own style but they are behaving in a consistent style with what the reader would expect from them, whereas Irwin has tried to add Heyer-esque language into a book with characters and a plot of her own creation. Which I guess you could say is because Heyer didn’t repeat characters and Christie did, but recreating someone else’s characters and making them seem consistent is not easy. Jill Paton Walsh did it with her Wimsey continuations, but she had the skeleton of a novel started by Sayers to help her with the first one and although I didn’t like all of the the later developments in that series, the characters always felt true to the originals. But not all of the authors who contributed to the Miss Marple short story continuation the other year managed it for sure. So that’s a significant achievement for me.
I don’t think everyone is going to like this, but I definitely think it’s a better choice than trying to recreate Christie’s style which could feel too much like a pastiche. Presumably the choice of Foley to write it was to achieve that – following with what Sophie Hannah has done in the Poirot continuations.
This is going to be absolutely everywhere when it comes out next week and you’re going to have no trouble finding it I think the timing of it being two weeks after the new Richard Osman was definitely a deliberate choice because I think it’s going to sell to the same sort of audience – people who are looking for a known quantity to read whether it’s to read on (an autumn) holiday or as a gift book this Christmas.
Happy Reading!
*Interestingly it also references Sleeping Murder which although it was released last, it was written a long way before that and omits some of the later developments as I mentioned in the other post and I totally agree with that choice
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 