July's Book of the Month: A Caribbean Mystery
Tuppence
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?
A Caribbean Mystery has been described as one of Christie's most solvable mysteries. Would you agree?
Comments
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.
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.
@Tuppence - please cite your sources so that we may look at this claim in more depth.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Here are my thoughts on the solution to Murder in Mesopotamia: http://legacy.agathachristie.com/insight/papers/2010/02/15/solution-murder-mesopotamia-plausible/
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.
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.
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 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.
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."