She ensures that the soon-to-be victims deserve all they get, being either wicked, nasty or occasionally just tiresome. “It was in my head.”įor me, one of the major joys of Christie’s books is that they manage the difficult feat of being full of corpses and yet free of angst – a trick the Golden Age authors excelled in and modern authors seem to have forgotten. “Oh, it wasn’t in the crossword,” said Miss Marple vaguely. “But one’s a five-letter word and one’s a seven. “That’s Tokay,” said Lucy, looking back from the door. “Tontine and Tokay – I always mix those two words up. “I wish I had a dictionary here,” she murmured. Miss Marple put down her knitting and picked up The Times with a half-done crossword puzzle. She gives us some nice village parallels to shed light on the characters of the suspects she twinkles affectionately at both young Inspector Craddock and Lucy she does a bit of gentle match-making and she gives us some classic Delphic pronouncements that leave the reader as beautifully baffled as the other characters. I love Miss Marple as a character, even more than M Poirot and his little grey cells, and she’s on top form in this one. But the route to it isn’t as well defined as Christie’s usual.īut regardless, this is still one of my favourite Christie books. That’s not to say that the solution is unclear it isn’t – it makes perfect sense. It’s never quite clear how Miss Marple arrives at the solution, other than her extensive knowledge of human nature. This book gets a little criticism for not really having many clues or much actual detection element in it. Feeling too old and unfit to snoop around herself, Miss Marple asks Lucy Eyelesbarrow to hunt for the body and so Lucy takes a job at Rutherford Hall…
Miss Marple knows Mrs McGillicuddy is a sensible woman with no imagination, so believes that she saw exactly what she claims. However, no body is found on the train, and there the matter would probably have rested, but for the fact that Mrs McGillicuddy was on her way to St Mary Mead to visit her old friend, Jane Marple. He suspects she’s just been napping and has dreamt the whole thing, but he’s a conscientious man so he reports the matter at the next station. Unable to do anything to prevent it, she reports it to the conductor. As a blind flies up on the carriage opposite her, she is horrified to see a woman being strangled by a tall, dark man. When Elspeth McGillicuddy glances out of the window of her train carriage, she can see straight into another train that is running parallel to her own.
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