Like so many, I grew up reading Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie mysteries. As an adult, I watched many of them come alive on TV, especially during the pandemic, together with Abhishek.
So I was delighted when I came across a new Miss Marple mystery, Murder at the Grand Alpine Hotel, written by Lucy Foley. It comes 50 years after Christie’s last Miss Marple novel was published. I sat up late reading it last night. The setting is a hotel high in the Swiss Alps, where a guest gets into a gondola alive and is found dead at the top of the mountain.
And what a ride it was. The first half seemed a bit slow, but the stage was being set. The second half was exhilarating. I thought I had the murderer figured out, but as always happens, the surprises came one after another.
That’s what a good mystery does. It sprinkles the clues, lets the reader try to solve it in parallel, and then does the final reveal. As I wrote about short stories, I am always trying to guess the twist at the end and rarely succeed. In all these years, my record hasn’t improved! Perhaps that is the point. A mystery I could solve would be one I would forget.
There are many new thrillers, but there is still something delightful in seeing how the legends (Holmes, Poirot, Marple) go about their work. Miss Marple is my favourite of the three for a simple reason. She is the one we underestimate, just like the suspects do. Her method is not deduction from cigarette ash or the little grey cells. In a Wall Street Journal interview, Lucy Foley said that Marple has no formal training as a detective, and solves cases through her understanding of character and psychology, gained from “a lifetime of observing people”. Foley based her on her own grandmother. That method, built in a small English village, works just as well in a luxury hotel in the Alps.
I am so happy that, over the years, the estates have had new books written by great contemporary authors. Sophie Hannah has written new Poirot mysteries. Anthony Horowitz, one of my favourite authors, has written both Sherlock Holmes and James Bond novels. (I should add Bond to this mix, though I never read any of Ian Fleming’s Bond books.) Rather than leave the legends frozen in time, the estates have handed them to storytellers who grew up loving them, just as I did.
In our busy, fast-paced, social media–filled and increasingly AI-centric world, there is nothing like losing oneself in an old-fashioned mystery. The phone stays aside, the hours slip by, and it’s just me, the book, and an elderly lady quietly knitting while she figures out who did it. And that’s exactly what I did last night.
Also see: Life Notes #57: Cosy Mysteries and Short Stories, Life Notes #44: Short Stories, My Life System #81: Fiction Immersion
