UNCOMMON MYSTERIES: Agatha Christie, The Thirteen Problems (The Tuesday Club Murders) 1932

           “The Tuesday Night Club” identifies the characters meeting at Miss Marple’s house in St. Mary Mead: Miss Jane Marple, her nephew the novelist Raymond West, the artist Joyce Lempriére, the solicitor Mr. Petherick, the clergyman Dr. Pender, and retired Scotland Yard commissioner Sir Henry Clithering, who proposes the first problem, the idea being to present to the others a mystery to which the teller knows the solution and see who can solve it. These are the earliest stories about Miss Marple and they play out with the same result in each case: Miss Marple finds a parallel story in the village life of St. Mary Mead and goes straight to the correct answer. Everyone marvels. No one expects her to do it again the next time, but she does.

            In Sir Henry’s problem, the husband seduces the maid and then gets her to prepare a trifle with poisoned “hundreds and thousands,” sweet decorations for desserts, to kill the wife. Dr. Pender tells the story of “The Idol House of Astarte,” in which Elliot Haydon, rushing to his cousin Richard’s aid at a masquerade when the latter stumbles in front of Diana Ashley (dressed up as Astarte), stabs him with the dagger in the belt of his brigand’s costume and then replaces the dagger, all with his back to the other guests. “Ingots of Gold” concerns the supposed search for Spanish gold off Cornwall by an acquaintance of West’s who has invited him down and who is actually hauling off gold stolen from a modern-day boat wreck. Joyce Lempriere tells another Cornish story, “The Blood-Stained Pavement,” about a bluebeard who knocks off a succession of wives he meets at watering hioles. Petherick’s story, “Motive versus Opportunity,” which he promises to be free of legal tricks, involves the use by the nephew and one of the rightful heirs of disappearing ink on the will of the old man who’s been charmed by a golddigger into changing his will to leave everything to her, cutting out the nieces and nephew.

            And so it goes through the stories, although Christie changes the venue and the characters, with the next group as Miss Marple attends a country-house party. Despite the predictability and the stock characters, the stories are entertaining and occasionally quite funny. Miss Marple is solidly in a tradition of armchair sleuths who are able to draw on a wide knowledge of criminal activity.  The surprise is that the knowledge comes not from studying the crimes going back a century, as Holmes seems to have done, but simply having observed human nature at work in a small English village over a lifetime.