Judy’s Comments (group member since Oct 01, 2015)

Judy’s comments from the Reading the Detectives group.

I agree Miss Marple gets better as a character in the later books, Sandy, It's good to see that both opening entries in these series were so strong, getting these two great detectives off to a flying start.

Susan, I was going to ask if people have been watching the TV adaptations. I saw the Joan Hickson version a few years ago and remember really enjoying it and liking Paul Eddington and Cheryl Campbell as the Clements.

This time around, I thought I'd try the more recent 'Marple' TV version with Geraldine McEwan. I must say it has a fantastic all-star cast, including Sir Derek Jacobi, Janet McTeer, Tim McInnerny, Jane Asher and, my personal favourite, Mark Gatiss as Hawes.

But I thought it made too many unnecessary changes to the plot, in particular introducing a Brief Encounter type romantic back story for Miss Marple with various station scenes. Then again, my railway-mad husband liked this as it meant we saw some steam trains!

Good to hear you are enjoying it, Sandy. I also liked Henry but I agree it was hard to see why he is involved.

Haha, thanks, Mike! That's an interesting point about how language has changed - I definitely don't think 'leaving by the back window' now makes us envision French windows.

As we're calling this challenge 'Poirot vs Marple', I'm just wondering, which detective's first novel do people prefer?

I'm slightly torn, as I prefer Murder at the Vicarage as a novel, but I think Poirot comes across more strongly as a character and plays a bigger part in his first novel than Miss Marple does in hers. Anyway, I think they are both great starts to a series.

I think this book has a clever plot and can see why Elizabeth Daly was said to be Agatha Christie's favourite American mystery writer - I certainly didn't see the twist coming! There was also an unusual reason for the face of the corpse being disfigured - I jumped to the wrong conclusion about that.

Just found the quote about Christie thinking there were too many sub-plots, which is from her Autobiography - I'm not sure where I saw this but it is quoted on lots of websites.

"Reading Murder at the Vicarage now, I am not so pleased with it as I was at the time. It has, I think, far too many characters, and too many sub-plots. But at any rate the main plot is sound. The village is as real to me as it could be –and indeed there are several villages remarkably like it, even in these days."

I think she may have a point about there being too many characters, but I'm not sure I'd want to lose any of them!

Mike, thanks for the thoughtful comments on the whole question of time of death, which I'll admit I found quite confusing and I also wondered if it could be quite that exact.

I do think the whole double bluff idea is very clever though, and I believe it has been copied quite a lot since in TV shows, etc.

Jackie, I believe I saw somewhere the other day that Christie herself later commented on the novel being unnecessarily complicated - possibly this was in Secret Notebooks? I'll have a look and see if I can find the quote...

I've been intermittently reading The Female Detective by Andrew Forrester, which is some short stories first published in 1864. I'm now halfway through. It's interesting but I have to say I'm finding some of it pretty grim, and am wondering why British Library chose to republish it - there isn't actually all that much about the "female detective" in the stories so far.

Interesting comparison with Mary Stewart, Jackie, I think I've only read one or two by her so far though I'd like to read more.

Susan, must admit I haven't read anything by Kate Mosse, but she has said she is planning to concentrate on crime fiction in future. I just had a look and found this comment in a recent interview: "After all these years, I’m finally turning to crime. My next series will be historic detective fiction inspired by real-life cold cases (that’s to say, cases that were never solved). I’m starting in the 19th century with a murder in my own family."

https://blog.freshfiction.com/kate-mo...

That was amusing! I did wonder if the vicar could have insisted on telling Inspector Slack about the clock - but, having said that, it serves Slack right that he doesn't bother after being slapped down multiple times.

Sandy wrote: "Do you think Christie expected to continue with Miss Marple as a main character? She is very secondary to the vicar in this book."

Great question! I've just had a look at the Agatha Christie website, and, by the time this novel came out, Christie had already published a lot of Miss Marple short stories in magazines, starting in 1927. So it seems as if she was already set on having Miss Marple as a series detective, even though the short story collection, The Thirteen Problems, was only published as a book after this novel.

However, the vicar is definitely an attractive character and I do wonder if she was tempted to have him as a detective as well? He does appear in a couple of her other books but I don't think he is a major character in those.

Jackie wrote: "I think I forgot about this thread!

I am just finished Smouldering Fire (love D.E. Stevenson) ..."

I love D.E. Stevenson too and read Smouldering Fire recently, but was a bit surprised by the melodramatic plot of that one - I suppose she fancied trying something different! I have a couple of hers lined up to read soon.

Mike, I noticed Lady Susan's personality changing quite a lot too. We've had some discussion of this over in the spoiler thread, for when you get to the end.

Thank you for opening the threads, Susan. Who is reading this one?

I found it an enjoyable read and liked the character of Henry Gamadge, so I'm rather sad that this book is the only one in the series in print in the UK.

The spoiler thread is linked below:
https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

Victoria wrote: "John Curran wrote the introduction to my edition, he talks about the notebooks in it... I just checked on the Harper Collins website and found they still sell an edition with the John Curran introduction and the unpublished chapter.

Thank you, this looks like a gorgeous edition! It's possible to read a sample, including the introduction, at the Harper Collins website:
https://harpercollins.co.uk/products/...

I think this is probably my favourite Miss Marple and maybe my favourite Christie so far, I love it. The village atmosphere is brilliant and the vicar who narrates the story is a great character.

Having said that, I think there are some interesting differences between Miss Marple in this book and her character in the later books in the series - she seems slightly less gentle and kindly here. There are also quite long sections where she doesn't appear.

Thank you for opening up the threads, Susan. After the first Poirot novel, we're now on to the first full Miss Marple novel - though Christie had already written short stories about her.

Who is reading this one? The spoiler thread is linked below:
https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

I've started Please Pass the Gilt by Rex Stout, a late Nero Wolfe book written in 1973 - feels a bit strange so far, as some of it is the same world as in the earlier books but people have colour TVs, etc!