The Thirteen Problems by Agatha Christie

The book was dedicated to Leonard and Katharine Woolley, the famous archaeologist and his wife, whom Mrs Christie met in 1928 in the Middle East, when travelling alone following her divorce. The stories are told in largely the same order that they first appeared in those magazines, although one of two skip about a bit. Don’t worry if you haven’t read the book, I promise I won’t reveal any of its important secrets!Īs in those previous books of short stories, the individual tales first appeared in magazine format, either in The Royal magazine, The Story-Teller, or in Nash’s Pall Mall magazine all first appearing between 19. Unlike Partners in Crime and The Mysterious Mr Quin, where the books consist of a sequence of short stories that build up to an episodically narrated novel, The Thirteen Problems feels much more like individual short stories gathered together under a simple framework, in order to create something that looks like a novel, but isn’t.

Naturally, this is an exercise where they all fail dismally apart from Miss Marple, whose calm and quiet consideration of each narrative instantly sees through the mist and works out what happened and whodunit.

In which we meet again Miss Marple and her detective-fiction writing nephew Raymond West together with four friends they set up the Tuesday Night Club where each one would tell a story of an unsolved crime and the companions would have a think and come up with the identity of the criminal.

The Thirteen Problems by Agatha Christie