History and Mystery Reads

Rating: 7/10

• Plot: A passenger sees a woman strangled in a train running alongside hers. No body is found and nobody believes her.
• Clues: Fair but thin; more attention goes to the household than the evidence.
• Reveal: The killer’s identity satisfies. The victim’s identity, oddly, is left looser than it should be.

Few mysteries open better. Elspeth McGillicuddy, on her way to visit Jane Marple, glances out as another train draws level and sees a man strangling a woman. Then the trains separate. The railway finds nothing, the police find nothing, and only Miss Marple takes her seriously.

Marple, now elderly, can’t search herself, so she sends an agent: Lucy Eyelesbarrow, a first-class Oxford mathematician who has chosen to become a very expensive domestic help. Lucy takes a post at Rutherford Hall, a gloomy house beside the line, and starts hunting the grounds for a body.

Lucy is the book’s great asset. She is efficient, amused and underused by the world, and several of the Crackenthorpe men start to fall for her, as does the reader. The family is a good Christie assembly: a miserly, hypochondriac father, sons with debts and grievances, and an estate held hostage by a will.

The problem is the second half. Once the body turns up, the opening’s energy leaks away into interviews and inheritance arithmetic. Inspector Craddock returns with less to do than in A Murder Is Announced. The solution depends on a staged scene of the kind Christie leaned on too often later. And the question of who the dead woman was, central for much of the book, is settled with surprising vagueness.

The 7 is for the opening, for Lucy, and for the pleasure of Christie working one strong image for all it is worth. Newcomers to Marple could start here happily. They should just expect the train to slow down.