A review of A Murder is Announced by Agatha Christie – 230622
The first reading of A Murder is Announced took place on Wednesday, June 14th, at The Trengilly Wartha at 6.30pm. Friends please accept this, the only intimation. Astonishingly, this was the first time that I had read this Christie classic, originally published in 1950 and the fifth in her Miss Marples series, although I have seen and heard adaptations and so it was difficult to treat it with a tabula rasa. Nevertheless, it was a terrific read and fitted my brief for light holiday reading fare to a tee.
There were a number of features that caught my attention. The first was the sense of excitement that the arrival of the local newspaper created in small communities such as Chipping Cleghorn. The immediacy of social media has at some cost to reliability and truth has pretty much led to the downfall of local newspapers, but there was a time when they were the reliable source of information that confirmed or denied the tittle-tattle around the village pump.
Of particular interest was the Personal Notices and the advert announcing that a murder was to take place at Little Paddocks excited the local worthies in Chipping Cleghorn. The general consensus was that a game of Murder was to be staged, a detective style party game that was all the rage in the 1930s and also features in Ngaio Marsh’s A Man Lay Dying (1934) and Mary Fitt’s Three Sisters Flew Home (1936), and they all make pretences to be at Letitia Blackstock’s residence for the appointed hour. However, the announcement seems as much as a surprise to Laetitia as it does to anyone else. While the lights go out and someone is murdered, it is not exactly a game, but the end result is a corpse that needs to be identified and a murderer that needs to be caught.
Much of the investigation centres around who was where and who saw what as a torch was shone around the room into the eyes of all those who were present before the fatal shots, bringing into question the reliability of witnesses and the unerring knack of two or more witnesses who saw the same thing to have different impressions of what took place, a theme that was central to John Dickson Carr’s The Black Spectacles (1939).
Two spinsters, Misses Murgatroyd and Hinchcliffe, try to re-enact the scene in their mind’s eye and Murgatroyd pays with her life for a revelation that comes to her in a flash, but too late to be acted upon. Murders come in threes in Miss Marple stories and the other victim is the bumbling, slightly dotty companion of Laetitia, Dora Bunner, whose death from poisoning after her birthday party in which she enjoyed a chocolate concoction called Delicious Death, is not only an inevitable consequence of the first murder but also a clue to the identity of the killer.
A post-war feature of the book is the presence of refugees, the initial victim, Rudolf Scherz, is a petty thief from Switzerland while Blackstock’s maid, the fiery and temperamental Mitzi, is from Mittel Europa with a pathological hatred and mistrust of any figure of authority. She is a wonderful character and Miss Marple, who operates in the background having been recommended to / foisted on Inspector Craddock by her friend, the eminent former head of Scotland Yard, Sir Henry Clethering, devises a stratagem in which the maid, at some risk to herself, induces the murderer to reveal themselves.
There are plenty of suspects and motive enough for killing Laetitia as she is about to inherit a large amount of money. Christie is at her best in turning the reader’s suspicions one way and then another with a pool of suspects who are not all they seem to be or are so innocent that they can easily be taken advantage of. She does not exactly play fair with the reader, but makes up for that by delivering a superb ending that takes the breath away.
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