The Thirteen Problems: Agatha Christie

The other evening on the train I noticed the woman across the aisle from me reading The Murder on the Links, and I felt an uncontrollable urge to rip it out of her hands and take it away. Yes, it's that time of year. It's time for me to glom onto Agatha Christie novels. Thankfully it's relative easy to track down used copies, isn't it?

I don't recall if I've ever read any Miss Marple, and the reasons for that were unclear for me. I've always preferred Poirot (though future reviews will question this too), probably for his stellar appearance in one of the best Christie novels, Murder on the Orient Express. But I've also realized recently that my all-time favourite Christie novel is And Then There Were None, which features neither Poirot nor Marple. This is probably why I disproportionately tend to not care for Marple novels.

The Thirteen Problems is a series of short stories centered around Miss Marple and friends sitting around talking about unsolved mysteries though sadly there's no Robert Stack. Each chapter is one of these stories, and inevitably Miss Marple figures each and every one of them out despite the fact that, golly gosh, she's hardly ever left little St Mary Mead!

I think that's what bothers me about Miss Marple. She's the smartest one in the room but is constantly self-effacing and belittling herself for the fact that she's just from this little village. I know it's her character, but it bothers me and I find it annoying. Plus it's just a literary trick that gets really old really quickly. Oh, she's just this little old lady from a tiny village. But what, she's smarter than everyone in the room! And wait, she's smarter than everyone in the room again! And once again! It's a trope, and once you figure out that Miss Marple is going to be the one to solve the mystery, the trope becomes obvious and then it's annoying.

So I'm at a bit of an impasse here for me. I really don't want to read more Miss Marple, but beggars can't really be choosers when one feels a need to read Agatha Christie and is reliant on the selection at the library. To wit, another one of the three that I've picked up already features the clever Miss Marple. So we'll be back here with another.