The Thirteen Problems - SPOILER Thread

[Carol She's So Novel꧁꧂]

Reread & still didn't enjoy The 4 Suspects - a lot of assumptions (like the butcher really was delivering meat so he couldn't have been up to anything nefarious!) 2★

[Carol She's So Novel꧁꧂]

Susan wrote: "Now, one of the things I found really interesting about the Miss Marple story was that, at the end, Sanders (the husband) was hanged and Miss Marple remarks, "And a good job too." No Wimsey soul searching here! Was that the character, or the author, talking I wonder? No reason, of course, why it should have been the author and could have just been how she viewed Miss Marple seeing the world, but interesting, nonetheless.

Certainly a contrast to (view spoiler)[ Roger Ackroyd! (hide spoiler)] Does Christie become harsher as she gets older or is she giving the seemingly gentle Miss Marple a steelier character?

The best so far for me. I thought the murder was ingenious & worked well in the short story format. 5★

[Susan]

I will be interested to see if Miss Marple remains the same, or whether her character changes through the books.

[Judy]

I felt she seems a bit gentler in these stories than in Murder at the Vicarage, but I think some of the stories came first in magazines. Yes, it will be interesting to see how she changes, if she does!

[Suki]

I like the short stories a lot. I'm recovering from the flu, so I don't really have much stamina for long reads right now, so these were perfect. I had read this book a while ago, but I forgot the endings. I think that The Bloodstained Pavement was my favorite. The Blue Geranium seemed awfully familiar to me the first time I read the book, I wonder if it's been included in one (or more) mystery anthologies.

[Susan]

Yes, the Blue Geranium seemed familiar to me too. I am sure I have read other stories which were similar in theme...

[Carol She's So Novel꧁꧂]

I think these stories finished very strongly (possibly also the contrast to The Four Suspects which I found banal)

A Christmas Tragedy

I really thought this was cleverly done! I was surprised by the solution. 5★

The Herb of Death

a quibble that a cook wouldn't recognise sage? Of course a servant must be stupid! I do remember an essay about Christie expressing bafflement at Christie's written contempt for female servants when she had a very close relationship with some of her own. I'll do a search later & see if I can find the article. Still 5★

The Affair at the Bungalow.

& another regular Christie theme actresses are stupid. How could Jane Helier remember her lines in a play if she couldn't keep her story straight??? A little over complicated for a short story, but still clever 4★

Death by Drowning

Wow! Totally taken by surprise! A very clever story indeed. The wheelbarrow/pram was a clue I didn't pick up on. & a very Christie twist. Equal favourite for me with A Christmas Tragedy 5★

[Susan]

I would agree that Death by Drowning was a very strong story and had good characters and a neat twist.

[Carol She's So Novel꧁꧂]

I had to wrap up my reading quickly as with this being February the end of the month comes quickly. Going to write up my reviews of the individual stories & then put my copy "in hibernation until we read the rest of the stories. :)

[Lady Clementina]

Susan wrote: "I would agree that Death by Drowning was a very strong story and had good characters and a neat twist."

The end was completely unexpected- I didn't see it coming at all.

[Carol She's So Novel꧁꧂]

I've looked & I can't find the article about Christie & her real life relationships with her female servants. It could have been a magazine article I guess!

& I found my perfect Miss Marple.



This is Geraldine MacEwan, isn't it? :D I never saw her on TV, so it is uncanny how she looks like the Miss Marple of my imagination. :)

[Susan]

I love the carpet bag :)

[Marcus]

Finished the Thirteen Stories a couple of days ago (I'm a little bit late in the readings!). I'm reading the short stories in "The Complete Short Stories: A Miss Marple Collection", so I'm not finished with the book. I just read one of them named "The Case of the Perfect Maid". Fantastic performance of Miss Marple and a great deal with the not so friendly Inspector Slack. Like it a lot!

[Susan]

I like Inspector Slack, Marcus :)

[Leslie]

Susan wrote: "I like Inspector Slack, Marcus :)"

I like him in the "man you love to hate" kind of way! I love the description of him in The Body in the Library as the sort of man who loves to interrupt people trying to tell him something -- that was certainly how he behaved in Murder at the Vicarage!

[Susan]

Yes, but he is a great foil for Miss Marple and I think she likes him - or enjoys teasing him...

[Jan C]

Reading the stories in the Miss Marple: The Complete Short Stories and finished the original thirteen. I had read this book years ago so when I was able to solve the mystery, I had to question whether it was because I previously read it or saw it in one of the tv productions or was just being astute.

A number of the stories (or parts of the stories) were, I think, later incorporated into larger Marple and possibly Poirot stories, possibly other books as well. Just plot points. She may be like Eugene O'Neill - if something didn't work in one of his plays he would hold on to it and use it in another. Nothing was ever wasted. And I can see that being true for Christie as well.

For instance, in the story of Mr. Sanders (?) killing his wife and bringing in three witnesses to help him discover her body and they all (or, at least, Miss Marple) saw the hat on the head and then later seeing the hat not on the head, this is similar to Evil Under the Sun where a hat is seen on the head of the "corpse", no face is visible to the "witness". There were a number of such instances in these early stories where I could see elements of later stories, not necessarily featuring the same character.

I am not certain that Jane H.'s slips in her stories were not perhaps calculated slips. She was an actress. While I could forget that while reading the story, I wondered about it after the conclusion when it was clear that the one person she hadn't been able to fool was Miss M.

On the whole, enjoyable stories. And I will probably continue and finish the rest of the stories now.

[Lady Clementina]

Jan C wrote: "Reading the stories in the Miss Marple: The Complete Short Stories and finished the original thirteen. I had read this book years ago so when I was able to solve the mystery, I had to ..."

I didn't want to mention Evil under the Sun in case some of us hadn't read it- but did notice the resemblance.

Jane did want to know what to do, so perhaps the slips were.

[Jan C]

I saw other examples but that was the one that leaped off the page at me. I might not have mentioned it specifically if we were reading Poirot books.

[Lady Clementina]

Jan C wrote: "I saw other examples but that was the one that leaped off the page at me. I might not have mentioned it specifically if we were reading Poirot books."

There are several of her short stories that seem to be prototypes for novels- or even other short stories. I have noticed others as well but like you can;t remember the names. Someone also mentioned one in a review the other day with Poirot instead of Parker Pyne in the regatta mystery.

[Susan]

I think Christie often enlarged on short stories that, perhaps, she had published in magazines. I didn't realise until reading a book about her life, how she struggled financially, even when you would have thought she was very successful.

[Annabel]

I've read the Agatha Christie Notebooks - ie a book about her writing notebooks written by someone who has access to them (of whom I am incredibly jealous). They make fascinating reading, by the way. From these, it's very clear that she reused plots and ideas constantly, both unused and used ones.

Her alter ego Mrs Oliver says in my favourite quote of hers that she thinks of too many ideas and can't use them all, so you can understand AC reusing as many as she can in other books. (I'm also very guilty of this myself, I know - not just ideas but whole scenes getting shoehorned in because I like the setting, even if it doesn't fit my plot.

I think AC was also sometimes guilty of using too many ideas in one book just because she had thought of them. Some of the ends of her novels explode with alternative solutions and unlikely last-minute reveals of alternate identities, as though she was using up spare ideas in this way. Dead Man's Folly is to me an interesting example of a book where she had clearly thought of lots of plots to go with a setting and tried to blend them all in together. It doesn't quite work.