A Murder Is Announced

A Murder Is Announced (1950) Agatha Christie

Next up on my Miss Marple reading binge was A Murder is Announced.

The residents of Chipping Cleghorn are startled when their weekly paper has a strange personal announcement: ‘A murder is announced and will take place on Friday October 29th, at Little Paddocks at 6:30 p.m.’ And thus, the mystery begins.

This one I vaguely remembered, so it was fun seeing the clues dropped here and there. But of course I also loved the bits and pieces of life in an English village after WWII. I knew there were (in the US as well) all kinds of shortages during the war, but I hadn’t thought about those shortages continuing after the war.

“I suppose there was once heaps of coke and coal for everybody?” said Julia with the interest of one hearing about an unknown country.

“Yes, and cheap, too.”

“And anyone could go and buy as much as they wanted, without filling in anything, and there wasn’t any shortage? There was lots of it there?”

“All kinds and qualities–and not all stones and slates like what we get nowadays.”

“It must have been a wonderful world,” said Julia, with awe in her voice.

I think that passage there makes it quite clear what things were like. Almost as strange to consider from this point in history as the abundance was to those in the 40s and 50s.

Of course, this seems just as alien:

… They were people whose fathers and mothers and grandfathers and grandmothers, or whose aunts and uncles, had lived there before them. If somebody new came to live there, they brought letters of introduction, or they’d been in the same regiment or served in the same ship as someone there already. If anybody new–really a stranger–came, well, they stuck out–everybody wondered about them and didn’t rest until they found out.

Not the nosiness, but the small, close neighborhoods. How things change.

And I loved this description of Miss Marple’s handwriting:

“Writes just like my old grandmother,” he complained. “Spikey. Like a spider in the ink bottle, and all underlined.

Of course, with my grandmother, it was The Palmer Method, but still, it seems like there’s something about little old lady handwriting.
Rating: 8.5/10

Published by William Morrow

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