The Moving Finger

Written in the same year as Why Didn’t They Ask Evans? The Moving Finger is a very different crime novel, showing Christie’s astonishing powers of inventiveness at their peak.

Jerry Barton is recovering from an air-crash that has effectively ended his flying career. When his doctor suggests a change of scenery to aid his convalescence, Jerry and his twin sister Joanna let a cottage in the quiet market town of Lymstock. Nothing ever happens in Lymstock, they are assured, but a poison pen letter to Jerry piques his curiosity, and when they start to talk to their neighbours about it, they find that they are not the only ones to have been the recipient of the anonymous writer’s spite.

Soon the tongues are wagging; “there’s no smoke without fire,” the gossips keep saying. And the police are worried that sooner or later the letters will find a target who will react violently.

When a local woman commits suicide, the authority’s worst fears seem to have been realized, but rather than marking the end of the affair, the woman’s death sparks a train of unexpected events, not the least unexpected that Jerry finds himself asking a little old lady who is staying at the vicarage for assistance…

At this stage of her career Christie was still creating genuine protagonists rather than the routine shuffling of stock characters that she often resorted to later on in her career, and the formidable Mrs. Dane Calthrop, the effete Mr. Pye and the fiercely idealistic Dr. Owen Griffiths for whom Joanna suddenly develops an unexpected fascination are keenly drawn and have the stamp of greater realism than some of her other works.

While this is technically a Miss Marple novel, The Moving Finger is really Jerry Barton’s novel, written from his point of view, and with all the vigour that the reader would expect from an otherwise healthy young man.

What lifts The Moving Finger above every other Miss Marple novel, and most of Christie’s others, is that for once, her obligatory (and sometimes rather unconvincing) romantic sub-plot -- usually observed from an old man (Poirot) or Miss Marple’s perspective – takes centre-stage, in the form of a retelling of the Cinderella fairy tale. More to the point, it has genuine bearing on the novel’s denouement, and Jerry’s whirlwind romancing of his love makes The Moving Finger linger long in the reader’s memory long after Christie’s more famous mysteries have faded.

Cover for The Moving Finger

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