Dear Mummy,
We had a murder last night. Miss Springer, the gym mistress. It happened in the middle of the night and the police came and this morning they’re asking everybody questions. Miss Chadwick asked us not to talk to anybody about it, but I thought you’d like to know.
Jennifer Sutcliffe is just an ordinary fifteen-year-old schoolgirl, who likes to play tennis, and whose uncle disappeared, along with many others, amid the revolutionary ferment of the imaginary Gulf state of Rabat.
She has no idea of the perils swirling around her when she returns for the summer term to Meadowbank Girl’s School. Everything seems ordinary on the surface, even the arrival of new members of staff and pupils, such as Princess Shaista, the only close relative of the ruler of the late ruler of Ramat. But the mysterious Mr. Robinson is looking for something, and so are other people – people who will stop at nothing, including murder, to get what they want.
Before long, the bodies are piling up, and staff and pupils alike realize that there is a killer in their midst – a cat among the pigeons. Jennifer’s Mother who unwittingly is the key to the mystery has gone travelling in darkest Anatolia, so Jennifer in desperation sneaks out of school to get help…
As she neared the latter stages of her career, so from the mid-1950s onwards Agatha Christie tended to repeat some of her plots and characterizations; the unreliable narrator of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd reappeared in the guise of the protagonist of Endless Night, while the dissolute son of Hercule Poirot’s Christmas reappeared in A Pocket Full of Rye. Stock characters such as the blustering colonel, the glamorous widow and the expatriate big game hunter come home were shuffled with increasing and depressing regularity.
But a glorious exception to this was her 1959 novel, Cat Among The Pigeons, which seems to owe more than a passing nod to Josephine Tey’s Miss Pym Disposes.
Both feature skulduggery in a girl’s school; both have a charismatic headmistress, and Christie’s Princess Alia seems to be a goddaughter to Tey’s Nut Tart. But while Tey’s earlier story is beautifully restrained, and keeps a narrow focus, concentrating on character, Cat Among the Pigeons is all plot, Grand Guignol mayhem albeit depicted with Christie’s customary restraint.
But after the killer is exposed there is a beautifully observed little cameo that – together with the sparky heroine and her unconventional mother – lifts this into a different class altogether, and makes this one of the most memorable of all Agatha Christie’s novels.
