Tag Archives: Agatha Christie

I Try to Solve an Agatha Christie Mystery | Nemesis (Miss Marple)

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Mr. Rafiel from A Caribbean Mystery is back, this time with a posthumous mission for Miss Marple: “investigate a certain crime” and after a year, she will be entitled to GBP 20,000 from his estate. “Our code word, my dear lady, is Nemesis,” he writes in his letter. It’s a reference to something she tells him in A Caribbean Mystery and Miss Marple understands it to mean that he’d like her to correct a miscarriage of justice.

Nemesis is only the second-to-the-last Miss Marple novel, but to me, it feels more like her grand finale than Sleeping Murder does. Partly because Miss Marple feels older here. Nemesis has a larger cast of characters than Sleeping Murder, and also involves a physically strenuous walking tour, so there are more people here commenting on Miss Marple’s age and frailty. She plays along with it, as she does to help gather clues, but I also can’t help feeling that she is a bit more physically frail here than usual.

But more importantly, the mystery in Nemesis also feels more grandiose and more of a magnum opus, so to speak, than the one in Sleeping Murder. There are more references to other aspects of Miss Marple’s life: Mr. Rafiel, of course, but also references to her nephew Raymond and her old friend Sir Henry Clithering. And the mystery itself is also such a Mystery. Not just whodunnit and why, but also, what evern was done in the first place?

The journey to get to these answers is wonderfully twisty and complex. And the more I read, the more I realized that the reveal is likely to be really sad, with the kind of insights into human relationships that Agatha Christie is so good at.

First, the cast of suspects is huge. Mr. Rafiel sends Miss Marple on a tour that has fifteen other people on it. Presumably, at least one of those people is involved in the crime Mr. Rafiel wants Miss Marple to solve. Also possibly, could this turn into a Murder on the Orient Express situation, and all of them turn out to be involved?

Just as I was turning over that possibility in my mind (and getting cross-eyed staring at the list of suspects), Christie throws in another twist: Mr. Rafiel has also asked some old friends (a trio of sisters) along the tour route to invite Miss Marple to their home. The official reason is that he wants to give Miss Marple a break from one of the more strenuous days on the tour, but of course, we all know that it’s likely one or more of these sisters is actually involved in the crime.

Gradually, we learn that Mr. Rafiel’s son, Michael, was in prison for murdering a young woman. There were other young women who’d also gone missing and were presumed dead around the same time period, so even though Michael was convicted of one murder, it’s possible he was also responsible for others.

Important context is that Michael was known as a bad guy; he’d also previously been accused of raping another woman. I’ll flag here that characters in this novel express some outdated attitudes around sexual assault and false accusations from victims, which is very much a product of Christie’s time and thankfully no longer widely acceptable. But the basic thrust is that, however spotty Michael’s sexual history is, is he actually guilty of murder? And if he didn’t kill the young woman, who did and why?

And then, while Miss Marple is with the sisters, a member of the tour group is struck by a boulder and sent to hospital in critical condition. Who’s responsible, and is it in any way connected to the young woman’s murder?

Did I Solve the Mystery?

Yes! Or at least I mostly did. I thought a second character was involved in the crimes, who turned out to be innocent. But I guessed the killer for the most important crime, and I also picked up on pretty much all the important clues! So I’m going to clock this as practically a win, and laugh at the fact that I actually tried to complicate matters more than Christie herself intended.

***SPOILERS BELOW***

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I Try to Solve an Agatha Christie Mystery | Towards Zero (Superintendent Battle)

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The detective with her book-inspired makeup look
Much needed detective fuel:
British-themed tea in an Agatha Christie mug!

Okay, I admit it, I’m completely lost. I decided to try solving this mystery because the BBC adaptation was coming to Canada via Britbox this month, and I wanted to try my hand at it before watching the show. I also haven’t written a blog post in a while, and figured that going head-to-head with the Queen of Crime was the perfect way to kick off my blogging year.

Now here I am, 87% in and right before the chapter with the big reveal, and I’m absolutely at a loss. So I’m afraid my 2025 series of Agatha Christie challenges will very much likely kick off with a loss, but on the bright side, I’ve really been enjoying this book, and highly recommend it to any fan of Christie or mysteries in general.

First, it has the elements I love most in Christie’s mysteries: it features a fairly small cast of characters, all of whom have complex relationships with each other, and enough drama amongst them to fuel whatever the motive for murder will turn out to be. At its heart is tennis player Neville Strange, his ex-wife Audrey, and his current, younger wife Kay. From the start, it seems clear that Neville isn’t fully happy with the divorce; he speaks highly of Audrey’s character, expresses guilt over causing her heartbreak, and seems impatient whenever Kay complains about something. The love triangle comes to a head when Neville decides that he and Kay will visit his elderly relative Lady Tressilian (Anjelica Huston in the adaptation!), at the same time as Audrey visits her every year. Instant drama!

Added to the mix are two other men who turn the love triangle into a much more complex polygon: Thomas Royde, a childhood friend of Audrey’s who has been secretly in love with her for years, and Ted Latimer, a dashing young man who is friendly and rather flirty with Kay. Then there’s Mary Aldin, companion and distant cousin to Lady Tressilian, and of course, Lady Tressilian herself, a formidable woman (Anjelica Huston!) who stays in her bed full-time and uses a rope bell to call her maid.

One evening, a visitor, Mr Treves, tells the story about a child he knows who got away with murder (literal, cold-blooded murder) many years ago. That child would now be an adult, and Mr. Treves said they had such a distinctive physical feature that he would surely recognize them even now. Mr. Treves later returns to his hotel, finds a sign saying the lift is broken, and so climbs the stairs to his top floor room. He dies of a heart attack from the climb.

Fast forward a few days (?), and Lady Tressilian is also found dead in her bed, struck in the head with an unknown blunt object. All the evidence points to one of the characters, but of course, the case is never that simple.

I had a vague suspicion of one of the characters from the beginning, honestly for no good reason other than they made the most sense to me for the big reveal. But then they later did something that made me realize they’re actually likely innocent. And then came a flurry of new clues and mini-reveals that seem to make everything clearer to Superintendent Battle, but honestly only made me even more confused than ever. I don’t think that re-reading past chapters, or even my notes and highlights will make anything any clearer for me, mostly because I already did that and I’m still confused, LOL! So, without further ado, I’m going to lock in my answer, and see how I do!

Was I right?

Ahahahaha! No, absolutely not, not even close. I named my choice of murderer below, and a bunch of other suspects I’d discarded as suspects for various reasons. Then I make a joke about how, at this point, I wouldn’t be surprised if it was this one character I never suspected, and of course, that’s who it turned out to be. And of course, their motive makes total sense; I just didn’t see it at all.

So, well played, Dame Agatha Christie. The Queen of Crime has fooled me again. My ego would like to give myself partial credit for at least guessing the motive; I’d just assigned it to the wrong person. But, ultimately, no, I did not figure out whodunnit. So 2025 begins with Agatha Christie 1, Literary Treats 0, and a fun little mystery to kick off spring.

*** SPOILERS BELOW ***

My Verdict

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I Try to Solve an Agatha Christie Mystery | The Clocks (Hercule Poirot)

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I admit, I didn’t enjoy The Clocks as much as I did Dumb Witness. Nothing against Dame Agatha’s writing; it’s just that this one has elements of espionage in it, and I much prefer domestic crimes rooted in family dramas.

I’m also afraid that my eagerness to try another Agatha Christie over the holidays, I may break my victorious end to the year. I honestly didn’t expect to get through it so quickly, and that may be because, unlike with Dumb Witness, I figured this one had a spy-related solution and so didn’t really bother trying to solve it. At least until just pages before the big reveal, when I realized that, spy elements or no, I simply can’t resist trying to outsmart the Queen of Crime at every turn.

Here’s the set-up: freelance typist Sheila Webb is called to No. 19 Wilbraham Crescent, the home of Miss Pebmarsh, for a last-minute job. The door is unlatched, so even if Miss Pebmarsh isn’t home when Sheila arrives, she should just let herself into the sitting room to the right of the entrance. Sheila does so, and stumbles onto a dead body. As she’s processing the fact, Miss Pebmarsh arrives home. It turns out Miss Pebmarsh is blind, so Sheila warns her about the dead body, and runs out of the house screaming into the arms of Colin Lamb, who happens to be passing by. Colin is “officially” a marine biologist, but is really a spy. He’s friends with Hercule Poirot, who’s retired and kinda depressed, so Colin takes him the case to cheer him up.

Some elements of curiosity:

  • Sheila’s boss says that Miss Pebmarsh asked for her specifically, but Sheila doesn’t know why as she hasn’t ever done work with Miss Pebmarsh before. More oddly, Miss Pebmarsh denies making the call in the first place.
  • Sheila enters the house at around.3 pm; Miss Pebmarsh’s cuckoo clock chimes the hour. But there are four clocks in the room that are turned to the time 4:13. Miss Pebmarsh denies having those clocks at all. Later, as Inspector Hardcastle is about to take the clocks into evidence, he finds only three.
  • Inspector Hardcastle finds a business card on the dead man, but when he investigates, both the man’s name and his company don’t seem to exist.
  • During the inquest, Sheila’s co-worker Edna says that something couldn’t have happened the way one of the witnesses says it did. Shortly after, she turns up dead.

Somewhat ancillary to this, but possibly related, Colin is in the area because he’s investigating a person of interest. His only clue is the number 61, the letter W, and a drawing of a crescent. Living at No. 61 Wilbraham Crescent is an engineer who seems shady in that he’s bad at his job, but not necessarily the kind of shady that Colin is looking for.

Through both Colin and Inspector Hardcastle’s investigations, we meet a whole cast of characters in the neighbourhood, including an overworked mom whose husband is away for long stretches of time, a woman with 14 or 19 cats (different characters have different counts), and a few more. Poirot plays armchair detective in this one, literally, relying on Colin to share all possible clues while Poirot’s little grey cells do their work.

And while I didn’t quite put as much effort into solving this case as I usually do with other Agatha Christie cases, I’m somewhat (arrogantly) confident I know what happened. So I’m locking in my guess, with equal confidence that I will be wrong and my lack of interest in spy fiction kept me from picking up most of the relevant clues.

Did I Solve It?

LOL, no not at all. And even when I thought through a significant clue with a 50/50 chance of getting it right, I chose the wrong answer. Ironically, my proposed solution did somewhat touch on the answer to the espionage case Colin was working on, so I guess in this particular story, I turned out to be a better spy than detective!

*** SPOILERS BELOW ***

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