A late-Christie Marple that cleverly uses the reader's expectations against them, and compares well with her other novels of that period, such as Third Girl and Nemesis.
By the last decade and a half of her life, Agatha Christie had become increasingly unhappy with the modern world, and increasingly nostalgic for her late Victorian childhood and Edwardian youth. This manifested itself in her fiction, in the elegaic Elephants Can Remember and Nemesis, and the dreadful Third Girl, in which Christie shows herself to be very much at odds with the London of the Swinging Sixties.
However, Christie was also a shrewd observer of human nature, and realized that nostalgia is often the enemy of truth; people prefer to lament changes to the world while glossing over history's imperfections. She brings this trait to the fore in a late-period Miss Marple, At Bertram's Hotel, first published in 1965.
Jane Marple has come to stay at Bertrams Hotel, in a quiet part of London, courtesy of her niece; Bertram's is famous for it's teas, to the fascination of the visiting Americans. "They have real doughnuts." Muffins, too. The central heating is supplemented by good old-fashioned coal fires and "people of any dimension could find a comfortable chair at Bertram's." And on her first morning, she is delighted to be served breakfast by a real, live chambermaid.
It all seems too good to be true...
Bertram's has become a rendezvous for both the rich and famous, and the elderly too. But at the same time, a number of daring robberies have been committed across Britain and Ireland, in which famous people are implicated. The common thread is that all these people have alibis; they are actually seen at Bertram's Hotel when they are supposed to be at the scene of the robbery.
The second plot-thread is the romance between a young heiress and a motor racing driver. Her mother -- who gave her up for adoption at birth -- is also staying at the hotel, further complicating the romance, and it emerges that the heiress' mother, Bess Sedgewick, is at the centre of the novel.
Christie is often lampooned with simply using variations of Cluedo-characters in her novels, but Bess gives the lie to this. While Christie still shared the -- to modern British eyes at least -- curious fascination with titles that seems to exercise even modern American novelists setting their novels in Britain (even the otherwise excellent Elizabeth George shares this strange affliction), her portrayal of the wild child Bess is in every other way excellent.
But what really lifts At Bertram's Hotel to the front rank of Christie's novels is that she uses people's tendency to romanticize their youth against the reader's expectations, as a skilled fighter at judo will use an opponent's weight to throw their opponent. Her art of misdirection was rarely shown to better effect.
