Agatha Christie – A Murder Is Announced

Miss Marple, as always, disclaims any special gifts, ‘except perhaps a certain knowledge of human nature’ and a tendency always to believe the worst, a tendency fostered by her having lived all her life in an English village where human nature, apparently, is seen at its worst. In A Murder Is Announced, she works in association with a new police detective, Chief Inspector Dermot Craddock, a pleasant and intelligent young man who happens to be Sir Henry Clithering’s godson. Craddock will participate in three further Miss Marple cases: ‘Sanctuary’ from Double Sin (1961) and Miss Marple’s Final Cases (1979); 4.50 From Paddington (1957); and The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side (1962).

A Murder Is Announced is, despite its flaws, one of the most entertaining of the Jane Marple novels. It is also fascinating for the picture it gives of an England still in the throes of post-war muddle and discomfort. A great deal of minor social history can be gleaned from the pages of Agatha Christie: such novels of the twenties and thirties as The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Murder at the Vicarage, and Murder Is Easy give a number of details of what life was like in an English village in the years between the wars. The Second World War years themselves are only obliquely chronicled, but England in the immediate post-war period is portrayed in Taken at the Flood and A Murder Is Announced, and the inevitable breaking-up of the old village life is woven into the pages of The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side, several years later in 1962.

The flaws in A Murder Is Announced, however, are not to be overlooked. The reworking of such old Christie ploys as the ambiguity of names is not exactly a flaw if the author gets away with it, as Mrs Christie does. But she relies on coincidence a little too heavily this time, and she surely is wrong to allow Miss Marple not only to indulge in so unlikely an expression as ‘fall guy’, even if the old lady does claim to have picked it up from reading Dashiell Hammett, but also to hide in a broom cupboard and imitate a dead person’s voice in order to frighten a murderer into a confession. (‘I could always mimic people’s voices,’ said Miss Marple.) And do people really change so much in ten years that they can reasonably expect not to be recognized by old acquaintances?

Despite these quibbles, it has to be admitted that A Murder Is Announced is one of Mrs Christie’s most successful conjuring tricks. As usual, some of the best and, in retrospect, most infuriating clues are verbal: in this case, you could even say typographical. It is well worth re-reading the earlier parts of the best Christie novels, in the light of the knowledge of the conclusions, to see precisely how you have been misled, how the quickness of the author’s hand has deceived the reader’s eye. Even though, at the end of A Murder Is Announced, there are more cases of false identity than there are dead bodies at the end of Hamlet, you are likely to finish the novel feeling exasperated with yourself rather than with Mrs Christie. You will also have learned about a cake, known to Miss Blacklock’s family as ‘Delicious Death.’ It is the masterpiece of the temperamental cook Mitzi, who is a refugee from Nazi Germany. The recipe, unfortunately, is not divulged.

Some of the characterization is superb; some is sketchy. The lesbian couple are crudely labelled: one has a ‘short, man-like crop’ of hair, and a ‘manly stance’, while the other is ‘fat and amiable’. Mrs Christie never progressed beyond the most superficial descriptions of her homosexual characters (‘My dears,’ says Christopher Wren of the young detective in ‘Three Blind Mice’, ‘he’s very handsome, isn’t he? I do admire the police. So stern and hard-boiled.’).

There is a certain connection between A Murder Is Announced and an early Miss Marple Story, ‘The Companion’, in The Thirteen Problems (1932), which is about ‘two English ladies’ holidaying in Las Palmas. That Agatha Christie consciously bore the story in mind when she was planning the novel is attested to by the fact that the home address of the two women, as given in the hotel register, is ‘Little Paddocks, Caughton Weir, Bucks’. Little Paddocks, the reader may remember, is the name of Letitia Blacklock’s house in A Murder Is Announced.