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.

           

UNCOMMON MYSTERIES: Peter Dickinson, The Yellow Room Conspiracy (1994)

            When I was twenty years old, I briefly met Mandy Rice-Davies, who was performing a quite chaste act in an Istanbul night club. Between sets I introduced myself and we chatted for a couple of minutes. I didn’t mention the Profumo affair of the previous year—that would have been too gauche even for me and even at that age. The books and the movie about the Profumo scandal made over the next decades were trash that failed in capturing any real interest in the story. But in 1994, Peter Dickinson wrote a book called The Yellow Room Conspiracy which transcended—even though it was obviously inspired by—the sordid British government scandal of the Foreign Office secretary John Profumo sharing a mistress with a Russian military attaché, call girls hired to service rich businessmen and politicians, the shady Dr. Stephen Ward and his stable of girls for hire, and so on. 

            Peter Dickinson is an author whose books are often mentioned as among the top mysteries of the twentieth century, especially The Poison Oracle and The Glass-sided Ants’ Nest. But his fifty books are in a variety of genres, including children’s stories, and he doesn’t repeat himself. The Yellow Room Conspiracy is another unique production.  Dickinson recognizes that the interest of the story is not with the principals, and so he concentrates on the foreign secretary’s beautiful wife, whom he calls Lucy, and a man—he calls him Paul—who was at the very fringes of the scandal. Paul has loved Lucy since he first met her (and her four sisters) at their huge, ramshackle country house. The sisters’ attachment to the house, called Blatchards, and their bond with each other become active characters in the book.

            Paul and Lucy tell the story in alternating chapters.  Both are old and near death, and each thinks, until they urge one another to get the story down on tape and paper, that the other had something to do with the death of the man who first brought them together. This man, who was married to another of the sisters, died at Blatchards of gas poisoning just before the explosion that destroyed the house.

            The death at Blatchards is only one small part of the mystery surrounding these characters, a mystery that goes back to spy activities during the war and includes, over the decades, not only the five sisters but also nine men who were husbands or lovers of the five. The death at Blatchards, though it’s not definitively solved by the combined accounts of Paul and Lucy, is illuminated enough to let readers confirm their own guesses—or to decide they’ve been wrong. This slight open-endedness is one of many features making The Yellow Room Conspiracy unique.

UNCOMMON MYSTERIES: Erskine Childers, The Riddle of the Sands (1903)

           Childers’s is the most important literary voice in the movement to wake up England’s sleeping military preparedness around the turn of the century, well before the First World War.

            Carruthers the narrator, fashionable, successful and complacent, has missed the fall shooting season and out of boredom accepts the invitation of his old college friend Davies to join him in a yachting and duck-shooting expedition in the Baltic. Carruthers meets Davies in Flensburg and before long Davies reveals that he really wants to cruise the Frisian Islands in the North Sea because he is convinced the Germans are up to something among the little sand channels there. What convinces him is that when he spends some time with Dolman, a supposed German, and his pretty daughter, he begins to suspect that the German is really an Englishman and a spy for the Germans, which is confirmed for him when Dolman tries to kill him by leading him into a labyrinth of sand channels in a storm off Kiel.

            Davies is smitten by Dolman’s daughter and convinced she is innocent of her father’s espionage. Davies and Carruthers find that the Germans are concealing their activities with a supposed treasure salvage operation. Carruthers eavesdrops at the site of the salvage operation and hears enough of the Germans’ coded information to work out later a network of sandy channels emanating from seven Frisian and German ports, which have a semicircle of rail lines feeding to them on the mainland. Carruthers returns briefly to England to find out more about Dolman. Coming back, he gets on board a tug as it runs a test invasion with a coal lighter instead of a troop carrier in tow.

            Carruthers and Davies confront Dolman with their knowledge and promise him immunity in England. He and Clara, the daughter, go with Carruthers and Davies, but on the way, Dolman jumps overboard when no one is looking; he is apparently the author of the German invasion plan.

            The book makes it onto many lists of important crime novels and mysteries of historical significance. Occasionally the technicalities of sailing a small ocean-going boat and navigating the channels in the sands while keeping track of the tides dulls the suspense, but the book is still very readable.