Dana Stabenow recently read and reviewed Agatha Christie’s Marple by Mark Aldridge. You can still order a copy of this nonfiction book through the Webstore. https://bit.ly/4gTrG57.
Here’s Stabenow’s review of the book.
I’m no Christie scholar, or even a Miss Marple one, but I am a Jane fan, much more than an Hercule one as I found Poirot’s ego and affectations hard to take.* I’ve read all the Marple books and I think all the short stories. I’ve seen some of all the Marple television series but every single one of the episodes starring Joan Hickson multiple times.
This book is a worthy effort to collect all the stories around the Marple stories and put them into a timeline that lasts, good lord, nearly a century now. It includes interviews with friends and family and editors and agents, excerpts from the very few interviews Christie would consent to during her lifetime, and memories from cast and crew of almost all of the productions. There are lovely little discursions in the various chapters on the novels, as here from the story about At Bertram’s Hotel.
The real star of the novel is Bertram’s itself. It has often been argued that the hotel was based on Brown’s Hotel in Mayfair, while Dorothy Olding thought it might have been the Connaught in the same area…One person who believed the hotel to be Brown’s was Lord of the Rings author J.R.R. Tolkien, who was inspired to stay in the hotel after reading the novel, where he encountered his own mystery: the sound of of footsteps in the corridor. Deciding to investigate, he then found himself locked out of his room.
Aldridge makes a solemn promise at the beginning not to spoil any of the plots and he doesn’t let the reviewers he quotes spoil, either, but you’ll still get a picture of how Christie’s work was received at time of publication. There is also a sense of the evolution of how crime fiction was thought of then and now, from critics initially viewing it solely as frothy entertainment to accepting it as a respectable art form. Not to mention a cultural phenomenon.
*Always with the exception of my all time favorite Christie novel, Murder on the Orient Express, of course. If you haven’t seen the 1974 film starring the best ensemble cast of any film ever on any size screen, do so at once.