July's Book of the Month: A Caribbean Mystery

TuppenceTuppence City of London, United Kingdom
As Miss Marple sat basking in the Caribbean sunshine she felt mildly discontented with life. True, the warmth eased her rheumatism, but here in paradise nothing ever happened. Eventually, her interest was aroused by an old soldier’s yarn about a murderer he had known. Infuriatingly, just as he was about to show her a snapshot of this acquaintance, the Major was suddenly interrupted. A diversion that was to prove fatal.

A Caribbean Mystery has been described as one of Christie's most solvable mysteries. Would you agree?
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Comments

  • Hi Tuppence, who has said that the mystery is solvable, and where, please?
  • tudestudes Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
    I'm very fond of this book. I've read more than one time and still  a very pleasant
     reading.
    I don't know who has said that, but I disagree.  The murderer can be be anyone. Of course, the reader can solve the puzzle (as almost all of her stories), but this is quite different from saying that is one of the most solvable.

  • To say that A Caribbean Mystery is "one of Christie's most solvable mysteries" would be saying that finding the solution to the mystery is easy--that it's a piece of cake. And that isn't so because her mysteries are not easily solvable. If that were the case I don't think she would be considered the Queen of Mystery/Crime She is given that title because her puzzles are far from easily being solvable. It takes effort, work and thought from Agatha Christie herself as a writer to neatly tuck away the clues, throw the red herrings in there and misdirect us and from the reader he/she must see what these clues are, if the red herrings are indeed what they are and see where Christie is misdirecting our noses to a particular scent or whether they should be on some some other scent. 

    I'm may be getting a little off topic here, but Alfred Hitchcock is the Master of Suspense and he's given that for a reason. He keeps us glued to our seats and our eyes peeled to the film. 
  • Griselda said:
    Hi Tuppence, who has said that the mystery is solvable, and where, please?
    I would also like to know where this is coming from.  I have never heard that Caribbean Mystery is easily solvable, let alone "one of the most solvable."

    @Tuppence - please cite your sources so that we may look at this claim in more depth.
  • I totally agree with both of you, Tudes and ChristieFanForLife. There is no shortage of suspects, or a motive, and the motive for the murder in question is so generic, that there are few special clues as to who might have committed it. Money is usually the motive when somebody has committed a very similar crime before, and is going to do the same thing again, (after all, you don't tend to get insanely jealous over somebody twice in a row) and hot spots in the Caribbean are awash with people who have loads of money. The modus operendi could make it anybody, also. It isn't a weird crime with an ABC train guide next to the body, or anything.

    I think that the idea which might have suggested this story to Dame Agatha, might have been the thought that what is important is that the murderer must silence he who has evidence of his past because, crucially, he is about to do the same sort of crime again. I didn't get what that meant, and its significance, initially, and I was thinking, 'Well, surely you'd want to silence someone who knew you had killed, whether or not you were about to do the same thing again.' But actually, you would think that the person who recognized you would not be sure enough - unless it all happened again.

    I think that being a later work, the narrative of this novel does ramble on, a fact which actually obscures some of the main points. But when I am the age of Dame Agatha when she wrote A Caribbean Mystery, I shall be less succinct also, and it is a fantastic story, even if it lacks some crispness in the telling.

    I've just had a thought which has never occurred to me before...if we are asked to discuss a novel then presumably we don't have to do 'SPOILER ALERT' because we couldn't, anyway, discuss it, and whether it is solvable, without mentioning the solution.


  • edited July 2016
    Griselda said:
    I think that being a later work, the narrative of this novel does ramble on, a fact which actually obscures some of the main points. But when I am the age of Dame Agatha when she wrote A Caribbean Mystery, I shall be less succinct also, and it is a fantastic story, even if it lacks some crispness in the telling.

    I've just had a thought which has never occurred to me before...if we are asked to discuss a novel then presumably we don't have to do 'SPOILER ALERT' because we couldn't, anyway, discuss it, and whether it is solvable, without mentioning the solution.


    A lot of A.C.'s later work does intend to ramble on a bit and is not as tightly written as it was in years before but her cleverness and skill as a mystery writer were still there. Though the books were a bit weak her ability and talent were fortunately still there, especially when she wrote Endless Night. In her later books there are some little inconsistencies such as one spot of the book mentions something and the other book seems to contradict it but if there were better editing by her editors then these little mistakes could have easily been fixed. I have heard--even though I haven't read it so please don't spoil it :) --that her last Tommy & Tuppence book Postern Of Fate was Christie's worst book. I don't know because I haven't read it but I'm sure there are many who like the book. One of my later favorites would be Nemesis, it's so unique and original. Sure, it rambles here and there at some points but my goodness the plot alone would make you forget that! Her powers at creating such a fresh and glued to your seat mystery was still there.
  • Tommy_A_JonesTommy_A_Jones Gloucestershire, United Kingdom
    I can understand why people would think it easily solvable SPOILER ALERT!!! because of the glass eyes but as we are misdirected to look the other way we might miss it, I must admit tht sadly I saw all but 1 of the Joan Hickson's before reading the books so I can't say if I would have guessed correctly although I don't think I thought about guessing when watching but some of the books are solvable SPOILER ALERTS!!! who is likely to be able to menouvre themselves to kill other than the Householder, who is more able to kill a gossipy woman but a lady who she is talking to who is equipped to put on a performance, and if you have the seating schedule you could solve 'Death In The Clouds' although I didn't and if you think about it the Murderer(s) in Death On The Nile are obvious, you just have to sit and marshall your thoughts like Miss Marple does sometimes but if you do solve it or not it doesn't matter because most of the stories are excellent.
  • @Tommy_A_Jones - what makes you say that the solution to Death on the Nile is obvious?  Other than the murderers being the least suspicious suspects (ruled out), which is the pattern in Christie's books and well as usually the spouse, what specifically makes it obvious?
  • edited July 2016
    @Tommy_A_Jones, @Madame_Doyle -- the obvious isn't always the obvious. Even though the murderer might be the obvious looking back in hind-sight, and though she looked so obvious because she declared her hate for the deceased before Linnet was killed, as we read the book we're thinking that it can't be that obvious and this is where Agatha Christie plays her role of misdirecting us with other suspects in the book that have strong motives of their own. Maybe as we read we can guess one of the murderers but to guess that it involved another participant and one who didn't appeared to have such a motive for killing Linnet and to easily guess the whole plan between the two and the way it was carried out.....it's not that obvious. If the solution was that easy and we were to easily guess the whole entire plan and the way it was carried out, I don't think we would make it through the whole book. We would get pretty bored with it. We might guess one particular aspect of the solution but the whole entire thing--no, that's pretty rare. And if Death On The Nile is similar to another solution in another book, if we are reading Nile for the first time we really don't know if the author is going to pull the same ploy. We really don't know. We can guess but we truly really know. That's why we read through the whole book and not get through half of it and quit. It's not that obvious, it's not that easy. 
  • What I'm saying is that the murderer is easy to guess in her books because of her pattern of using some device to make us think that one or more suspects are cleared of suspicion.  The murderer is usually the spouse if there is one.  Those two reasons give it away that Simon Doyle is the murderer in Death on the Nile.  Other than that, I'm not aware of anything else that tells the reader that the two people cleared of suspicion are guilty.  If you can point out a book that doesn't apply to these two rules of thumb, it would fall into a minor category, such as And Then There Were None.  I can't think of any others.  The book you were hinting at is obvious because of the spouse, and so that wasn't a challenge, either.

    Hindsight is not a factor, because she doesn't deviate from this pattern.  As I read all of her mysteries over the course of two years, I could easily identify who was guilty, but it was the whys and hows that I found intriguing.  

  • SPOILER TO ALL OF THIS I think that there is subtlety in Agatha Christie's misdirections. In the ABC Murders, the moment when the killer reels off his clues in tidy alphabetical - or was it numerical order - makes it obvious that he had done the crime. But the strange structure of the plot - a clearly indicated other 'murderer' (set up) makes us discount that big  clue as we read the final third of the novel. In Death on the Nile, the characterisation and dialogue are sublime. There is little in the conversations to suggest that Jackie and Simon are in league. The action moves fast,  with murder coming fast upon murder (as it naturally would given the confines of the boat, and the impossibility of getting off it.) Clues are worked up - the necklace; what has that to do with it, we think and think - losing our focus. The novel's structure keeps us from guessing who is the killer - and one of them is closeted, out of the action and not seen for much of the middle section: other characters, very well-drawn, get the limelight. Balance is everything within these novels. And the narrative technique, which Mr Lombard kindly named for me, has the early part of the story told from the standpoint of Linnet, and then Jackie, and also Julia, and then Poirot is the eyes which see, and the mind which guides us, once the holiday is under way. It is very well-executed in this novel. If we had had more focus on Simon, we might have got the answer sooner, but it is the lot of (to be pitied) women, which attracts and retains our interest as we read.  
  • I think the only reason why we would guess the murderers in Death On The Nile is because the device was used before in other books, as you said @Madame_Doyle, but that wouldn't make the solution obvious or solvable on its own. But I do agree with you, the whys and hows are still intriguing and Agatha Christie does not let her readers down
  • @Griselda - the reason Simon is so obvious is because he is ruled out with his alleged injury.  The investigation does not focus on him but on the others, with the exception of Jackie, who also was in someone's presence the entire time that the first murder occurred.  She's not cleared of the following two murders, but Simon is.  At no time does anyone suggest that he could be the murderer, which is the obvious trickery.  We're meant to believe that he did not do it, no questions asked, and that is how the reader knows in Agatha Christie novels who the murderer is.  Now, picking up on that, the suspense for the reader lies in how Simon Doyle could possibly have murdered someone.

    The nail polish was stupid and unnecessary.

    @ChristieFanForLife  - the only time that Christie lets her fans down is with Murder in Mesopotamia.  We have the obvious solution of the person who is never once suspected and who also happens to be the spouse, and so the reader can easily guess the murderer.  But the suspense of how and why it was done is disappointing.  It's not believable.  In that case, some other solution would have worked better.  The book winds up as being silly.
  • Speaking of Murder In Mesopotamia @Madame_Doyle, I hear many critics say that the way the murder was carried out (the murder method) is rather unbelievable. But I will have to say that it took a lot of creativity for A.C. to come up with the quern-stone and the window. What is refreshing about Mesopotamia is the female narrator Nurse Leatheran. We get our share of male narrators (particularly in The Murder Of Roger Ackroyd, The Moving Finger, Endless Night, if there are some others they have not come to mind at the moment) so a female narrator is interesting. Another thing I like about the book is the evocative setting. Speaking of the solution again, what solution do you think could have worked better? 
  • Tommy_A_JonesTommy_A_Jones Gloucestershire, United Kingdom

    I haven't read the books in order so I suppose I learnt to not take things at face value, don't believe what you see actually happened because it might not have happened, the 1st part has helped me through life.

  • Speaking of Murder In Mesopotamia @Madame_Doyle, I hear many critics say that the way the murder was carried out (the murder method) is rather unbelievable. But I will have to say that it took a lot of creativity for A.C. to come up with the quern-stone and the window. What is refreshing about Mesopotamia is the female narrator Nurse Leatheran. We get our share of male narrators (particularly in The Murder Of Roger Ackroyd, The Moving Finger, Endless Night, if there are some others they have not come to mind at the moment) so a female narrator is interesting. Another thing I like about the book is the evocative setting. Speaking of the solution again, what solution do you think could have worked better? 
    I can't pretend to come up with better solutions than Agatha Christie, but in the case of Murder in Mesopotamia, which fails completely in its totally incredible solution, I could offer some suggestions around a woman unknowingly marrying the same man twice without ever recognizing him.  First of all, Dr. Leidner doesn't have to be the first spouse as well as the second.  He could have killed her for reasons other than revenge.  The first husband who is the stalker could have been one of the other characters or perhaps none of them.  The method of the murder is brilliant, one of her most genius, actually.  If the story could have been told with the threatening letters being a red herring and the suggestion of the first husband being alive remaining just that and not a reality, this might have been one of her best books.  Another possibility is that Dr. Leidner is the brother.  Or...we don't even need the first husband storyline.  The brilliant solution of dropping the weapon out the window is enough to carry the mystery.  Dr. Leidner is never even suspected as the murderer, since he is ruled out as being unable to have killed her by his alibi of location.  Some other motive would have worked equally well. 
  • About "Murder in Mesopotamia" - the "first husband" motif is important, because it is what brings Nurse Leatheran to the scene. But I have another, rather crazy idea: Louise is based on Katherine Woolley (who seems to have deserved the characterization as well as the murder wish!) and Leidner can be seen as based on Lionel Woolley, the archeologist, her husband, who seems to have been a reasonably positive person. So there has to be some explanation for why Leidner is murderous, and a distancing of him from Woolley.  After all, not every husband who catches his wife cheating will murder her! By making him this possessive, endlessly stalking, ruthless character she divorces him from the real Woolley and makes him believable. I agree that the murder method does seem unlikely and risky. After all, if the mask had been a trick just to frighten her, the person playing the trick would have had time to retreat by the time she got to the window - and even if not, psychologically, it doesn't make sense that she would push her head out through the bars and twist it to look up at her tormenter from below - it puts her in a subservient position, In her place, I wouldn't have bothered to stick my head out through window bars, but would have stuck my feet into slippers and dashed up to the roof to see who was there. Going up on the roof and facing the jokester (which is what she thought him) would leave her with a feeling of control - which was very important to her. 
    Back to "Caribbean" - I just realized that the idea of murdering someone who has reason for suspicion of a crime, because another, similar crime is planned, was also used by Charlotte Macleod in "The Plain Old Man", about 20 years later.
  • youngmrquinyoungmrquin Buenos Aires, Argentina
    Hello everyone! I read this while I was in highschool (now I am 28) and I really enjoyed. I didn't discover who the murderer was either.
    One thing I really would like to complain about is the lack of use of the exotic context. The title sells us a Caribbean story, but the area is so poorly described that doesn't play any sinificant part. As I see it, this same plotline could have been developed in Saint Mary Mead or anywhere.
  • GKCfanGKCfan Wisconsin, United States
    I don't mind turning the discussion to other novels, but don't forget that some people may not have read these other books, so beware of spoilers!  

    Here are my thoughts on the solution to Murder in Mesopotamiahttp://legacy.agathachristie.com/insight/papers/2010/02/15/solution-murder-mesopotamia-plausible/
  • Great insights @GKCfan--would love to read more of your thoughts to other Agatha Christie books as well. Will there be any new articles and information in the "Christie Papers" blog? 
  • I'd like to urge fans who don't already do it, to go on WIKI, and look up the various Agatha Christie novels. I just did it for Ordeal by Innocence, to check I was right about which book this was. There was an excerpt from a review in The Time Literary Supplement. It was very interesting about the strengths and possible weaknesses, as the reviewer saw them, of this novel. The reviewer attempted to make a case that Christie had been doing something different with the form of this novel.

    In fact, if I was involved in managing a forum to discuss Agatha Christie I would probably publish quotes from reviews of the time the novel were published and use them to stimulate some focused debate. It would be good to read contemporaneous reviews of various novels on this website.
  • edited July 2016
    Well I know that P.D. James, fellow mystery writer who passed away last year I believe it was, wasn't heavily influenced by Agatha Christie, in her own words, and didn't find her writing all that well-written but A.C. wasn't trying to bring together mystery and the literary form. In an interview with The Strand Magazine P.D. James said, "Obviously, I wouldn’t rate her as an important or even a very good novelist, but I rate her very highly as a fabricator of mystery. I think her ingenuity is absolutely extraordinary and her style is very serviceable. It suited the books very well. The dialogue is crisp and good. The books move at a fast pace and they are very, very readable and there is a kind of universality about them. She is read, really, all over the world. She appeals just as much in China as she does in the States and in England or in Scandinavia." 

    I don't see why a lot of writers find A.C.'s books not that well-written (I get tired of hearing that) because I find them to be so. I don't see what's so bad about the writing. They are simple, not confusing or fully complex as some writers are. Agatha Christie was an entertainer and experimented with different kinds of plot ideas and like the reviewer who reviewed Ordeal By Innocence, was doing something different. 
  • That is so patronising of PD James. 'Obviously', as if everyone agrees that Agatha Christie was an indifferent writer. I think PD James's work is pompous and totally lacking in any real insight into the human condition. Whether or not she intended to do more than entertain, Agatha Christie has the mind of a genius and saw through to the salient facts about human nature. How disrespectful even to comment on the writings of another author. She doesn't have to: she could refuse. Thank you ChristieFanForLife for the research, which I find most useful. 
  • edited July 2016
    I plan on releasing a mystery/detective fiction blog at some point (probably near the end of this year) and my first post talks about the evolution of mysteries and how today's mysteries lean more towards the psychological, exploring what makes a character tick and what makes them commit a crime. It's not so much about the intellectual "puzzle" as it once was. And if you look around the mystery-genre market, you find little, probably not even any mysteries that are "puzzle-crammed" as in the past. As P.D. James said, "I think that now the mystery has moved much closer to the mainstream novel." The stories lean more towards realism, including the solutions to the mysteries. I wrote in my blog post: The puzzle is still there and still matters though it may not be predominant as before. Now mysteries are complex and sophisticated, written in polished, literary prose--more in the style of Dorothy L. Sayers, yet different."

    I wanted to also mention that the literary style in mystery writing almost seems academic--not too academic, mind you. But what makes Agatha Christie so readable is her simple style of writing and anyone from all walks of life, from all trades and careers, from all social classes, and all ages can read her stories. She wasn't aiming to create a book full of literary brilliance such as The Great Gatsby. And that doesn't make her writing bad, not well-written, or not even a "very good novelist" as P.D. James pointed out. She was well-written and a very good novelist but not in the way most would think. Her writing doesn't take some getting used to in the sense you have to read a certain sentence or paragraph a few times to see what she meant. She was well-written in the sense that she was able to explore human nature and able to convey and describe it accurately and realistically. Also I must give P.D. James some credit to what she said though I don't agree with everything she said: ". . . and there is a kind of universality about them [Agatha Christie's books]. She is read, really, all over the world. She appeals just as much in China as she does in the States and in England or in Scandinavia." 
  • I think that if writers are going to concentrate on the psychological dimension that they need to be good. None of us really know what the thought processes of another person look like. It is very presumptious to do all this analysis of the movement of thought and the character thinking out loud, as though they can really get it right.

    I wish I knew how to share things online, because a friend of mine posted this link on Facebook which was the top ten under-rated modern mystery stoires. I shall try to copy them out and post them on this thread.
  • One of the great - really great - things about Agatha Christie, is that her writing combines very correct English with very clear writing - her sentences are short and simple (she avoids passive forms and clauses), the vocabulary is fairly limited, but the writing is very proper English - you won't find "wobbly" tenses, or sentences which "Start north and end west". That makes her writing enjoyable for native English readers, and at the same time intelligible for people for whom English is a foreign language. I'm bilingual (Israeli, but grew up several years in the U.S.) and I always recommend her books to my Israeli friends who want to improve their English. 
  • I think psychological dramas work better on television or film than in books. Probably the proliferation of television mystery dramas in turn influences modern writers: I'm thinking of the tv series Morse from the 80s.

     I think that Christie's overarching theme was largely the evil person disguised within polite society. Yes, sure, a few were good people who hit a problem, but mostly her art  was dedicated to exposing the bad apple, and the thrill comes from the thinking that we never really know which one is the killer, or the morally diseased person. Interestingly, that is why I see Columbo as the successor to Poirot. There is no attempt to put in a sympathetic back story, or much nuance. The episode starts with the murder, and the killer executing his plan ruthlessly, coldly, there in front of us, without regret or pity,  and with some satisfaction. Then cut to the act he is putting on for everyone else's sake, and the sake of the police. The enjoyment of watching the episode is seeing how this assassin acts his way through the remainder of the episode, and to see how cold-blooded and artificial he/she is in every way.






  • Well with the Inspector Morse series (the books), the author of the series Colin Dexter, seemed to have been influenced by classical murder puzzles. In an interview Dexter said, "I've never said anything significant about motive. Some very fine writers, Phyllis James or Ruth Rendell - their primary concern is to look into the abyss of human consciousness. Good for them; but not for me. For me, it's the twists and turns of the whodunnit." Here is an excerpt from an interview with The Strand Magazine with editor Andrew F. Gulli and Colin Dexter: 

    AFG: Well, I like whodunits a little more. Some of the mystery novels these days tend to be very dark and the authors seem to be trying to probe too much into the characters’ psychological depths.

    CD: Yes. If you’re not careful, you’re reading a psychological handbook, aren’t you?

    AFG: Exactly.

    CD: You’re probably going to ask me later, I suppose, but certainly I’ve always very much enjoyed the big surprise of being led up the garden path by writers like Agatha Christie. You knew that she was pulling the wool over your eyes from page one, but you didn’t know how she was doing it until you got to the last chapter. And, all right, some of them are very much better than others, but she’d certainly have five or six titles in a list of the top twenty novels ever written in the whodunit genre because she had a wonderfully gifted imagination for puzzling the reader. I loved that surprise at the end.

    A little earlier in the interview Colin Dexter said, "I suppose I must be categorized as a whodunit writer rather than as, the kind of writer who concentrates on the motivation of crime." 


  • That's interesting. He does admire and is influenced by AC, and dislikes too much deep psychology. I never read the books. It is something I should do. The tv dramatisation probably padded out the stories a bit - made the twist not as obvious.
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