The Thirteen Problems (Miss Marple 2)

‘I think I see my way,’ he said. ‘At least I can try…’

Five minutes later he was back at Mrs Bartlett’s cottage and facing Joe Ellis in the little parlour among the china dogs.

‘You lied to us, Ellis, about last night,’ he said crisply. ‘You were not in the kitchen here fixing the dresser between eight and eight-thirty. You were seen walking along the path by the river towards the bridge a few minutes before Rose Emmott was murdered.’

The man gasped.

‘She weren’t murdered—she weren’t. I had naught to do with it. She threw herself in, she did. She was desperate like. I wouldn’t have harmed a hair on her head, I wouldn’t.’

‘Then why did you lie as to where you were?’ asked Sir Henry keenly.

The man’s eyes shifted and lowered uncomfortably.

‘I was scared. Mrs B. saw me around there and when we heard just afterwards what had happened—well, she thought it might look bad for me. I fixed I’d say I was working here, and she agreed to back me up. She’s a rare one, she is. She’s always been good to me.’

Without a word Sir Henry left the room and walked into the kitchen. Mrs Bartlett was washing up at the sink.

‘Mrs Bartlett,’ he said, ‘I know everything. I think you’d better confess—that is, unless you want Joe Ellis hanged for something he didn’t do…No. I see you don’t want that. I’ll tell you what happened. You were out taking the laundry home. You came across Rose Emmott. You thought she’d given Joe the chuck and was taking up with this stranger. Now she was in trouble—Joe was prepared to come to the rescue—marry her if need be, and if she’d have him. He’s lived in your house for four years. You’ve fallen in love with him. You want him for yourself. You hated this girl—you couldn’t bear that this worthless little slut should take your man from you. You’re a strong woman, Mrs Bartlett. You caught the girl by the shoulders and shoved her over into the stream. A few minutes later you met Joe Ellis. The boy Jimmy saw you together in the distance—but in the darkness and the mist he assumed the perambulator was a wheelbarrow and two men wheeling it. You persuaded Joe that he might be suspected and you concocted what was supposed to be an alibi for him, but which was really an alibi for you. Now then, I’m right, am I not?’

He held his breath. He had staked all on this throw.

She stood before him rubbing her hands on her apron, slowly making up her mind.

‘It’s just as you say, sir,’ she said at last, in her quiet subdued voice (a dangerous voice, Sir Henry suddenly felt it to be). ‘I don’t know what came over me. Shameless—that’s what she was. It just came over me—she shan’t take Joe from me. I haven’t had a happy life, sir. My husband, he was a poor lot—an invalid and cross-grained. I nursed and looked after him true. And then Joe came here to lodge. I’m not such an old woman, sir, in spite of my grey hair. I’m just forty, sir. Joe’s one in a thousand. I’d have done anything for him—anything at all. He was like a little child, sir, so gentle and believing. He was mine, sir, to look after and see to. And this—this—’ She swallowed—checked her emotion. Even at this moment she was a strong woman. She stood up straight and looked at Sir Henry curiously. ‘I’m ready to come, sir. I never thought anyone would find out. I don’t know how you knew, sir—I don’t, I’m sure.’

Sir Henry shook his head gently.

‘It was not I who knew,’ he said—and he thought of the piece of paper still reposing in his pocket with the words on it written in neat old-fashioned handwriting.

‘Mrs Bartlett, with whom Joe Ellis lodges at 2 Mill Cottages.’

Miss Marple had been right again.

E-Book Extras

The Marples

Essay by Charles Osborne

The Marples

The Murder at the Vicarage; The Thirteen Problems; The Body in the Library; The Moving Finger; A Murder Is Announced; They Do It with Mirrors; A Pocket Full of Rye; 4.50 from Paddington; The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side; A Caribbean Mystery; At Bertram’s Hotel; Nemesis; Sleeping Murder; Miss Marple’s Final Cases

1. The Murder at the Vicarage (1930)

The murder of Colonel Protheroe—shot through the head—is a shock to everyone in St. Mary Mead, though hardly an unpleasant one. Now even the vicar, who had declared that killing the detested Protheroe would be ‘doing the world at large a favour,’ is a suspect—the Colonel has been dispatched in the clergyman’s study, no less. But tiny St. Mary Mead is overpopulated with suspects. There is of course the faithless Mrs Protheroe; and there is of course her young lover—an artist, to boot. Perhaps more surprising than the revelation of the murderer is the detective who will crack the case: ‘a whitehaired old lady with a gentle, appealing manner.’ Miss Jane Marple has arrived on the scene, and crime literature’s private men’s club of great detectives will never be the same.

Saturday Review of Literature: ‘When she really hits her stride, as she does here, Agatha Christie is hard to surpass.’

2. The Thirteen Problems (1932)

Over six Tuesday evenings a group gathers at Miss Marple’s house to ponder unsolved crimes. The company is inclined to forget their elderly hostess as they become mesmerized by the sinister tales they tell one another. But it is always Miss Marple’s quiet genius that names the criminal or the means of the misdeed. As indeed is true in subsequent gatherings at the country home of Colonel and Mrs Bantry, where another set of terrible wrongs is related by the assembled guests—and righted, by Miss Marple.

The stories: ‘The Tuesday Night Club’; ‘The Idol House of Astarte’; ‘Ingots of Gold’; ‘The Bloodstained Pavement’; ‘Motive v Opportunity’; ‘The Thumb Mark of St Peter’; ‘The Blue Geranium’; ‘The Companion’; ‘The Four Suspects’; ‘A Christmas Tragedy’; ‘The Herb of Death’; ‘The Affair at the Bungalow’; ‘Death by Drowning.’

Daily Mirror: ‘The plots are so good that one marvels…Most of them would have made a full-length thriller.’

3. The Body in the Library (1942)

The very-respectable Colonel and Mrs Bantry have awakened to discover the body of a young woman in their library. She is wearing evening dress and heavy make-up, which is now smeared across her cold cheeks. But who is she? How did she get there? And what is her connection with another dead girl, whose charred remains are later discovered in an abandoned quarry? The Bantrys turn to Miss Marple to solve the mystery.

Of note: Many of the residents of St. Mary Mead, who appeared in the first full-length Miss Marple mystery twelve years earlier, The Murder at the Vicarage, return in The Body in the Library. Mrs Christie wrote Body simultaneously with the Tommy and Tuppence Beresford spy thriller N or M?, alternating between the two novels to keep herself, as she put it, ‘fresh at task.’

The Times Literary Supplement wrote of this second Marple novel: ‘It is hard not to be impressed.’

4. The Moving Finger (1943)

Lymstock is a town with more than its share of shameful secrets—a town where even a sudden outbreak of anonymous hate-mail causes only a minor stir. But all of that changes when one of the recipients, Mrs Symmington, appears to have been driven to suicide. ‘I can’t go on,’ her final note reads. Only Miss Marple questions the coroner’s verdict. Was this the work of a poison pen? Or of a poisoner?

Of note: The Moving Finger was a favourite of its author. From An Autobiography (1977): ‘I find that…I am really pleased with…The Moving Finger. It is a great test to reread what one has written some seventeen or eighteen years before. One’s view changes. Some do not stand the test of time, others do.’

The Times: ‘Beyond all doubt the puzzle in The Moving Finger is fit for the experts.’

5. A Murder Is Announced (1950)

The invitation spelled it out quite clearly: ‘A murder is announced and will take place on Friday, October 29th, at Little Paddocks, at 6:30 p.m.’ Everyone in town expected a simple party game—a secret ‘murderer’ is chosen, the lights go out, the ‘victim’ falls, and the players guess ‘whodunit

.’ Amusing, indeed—until a real corpse is discovered. A game as murderous as this requires the most brilliant player of all: Jane Marple.

Robert Barnard: ‘As good as Agatha Christie ever wrote.’

A.A. Milne: ‘Establishes firmly her claim to the throne of detection. The plot is as ingenious as ever…the dialogue both wise and witty; while the suspense is maintained very skillfully…’

The New York Times Book Review: ‘A super-smooth Christie…neat murders in an English village…an assortment of her famous red herrings, all beautifully marinated.’

6. They Do It with Mirrors (1952)

A sense of danger pervades the rambling Victorian mansion in which Jane Marple’s friend Carrie Louise lives—and not only because the building doubles as a rehabilitation centre for criminal youths. One inmate attempts, and fails, to shoot dead the administrator. But simultaneously, in another part of the building, a mysterious visitor is less lucky. Miss Marple must employ all her cunning to solve the riddle of the stranger’s visit, and his murder—while protecting her friend from a similarly dreadful fate.