‘Progress,’ said Lady Selina vaguely. ‘Though it often seems to me it isn’t progress.’
– Agatha Christie, At Bertram’s Hotel (1965)

Death and mystery among the muffins and the best English tea – priced at 3s 6d.
– Express and Star, 1968

I’ve written before about the incongruity of pre-war literary characters turning up in the 1960s. And here we are again. Agatha Christie was seventy-five when At Bertram’s Hotel was published in 1965 and her heroine Miss Marple is shown as being about that as well.

Given that the character was eighty-nine in the previous decade’s 4:50 from Paddington, this is progress of a sort, but she’s still far too old to feel comfortable in Swinging London, and she’s struggling a little with modern manners. ‘Nymphomania,’ we’re told, ‘was not a word that Miss Marple would have used.’ No, we didn’t really think it would be.

Elsewhere, crusty old Colonel Luscombe worries that his ward seems to have a crush on a racing driver, but consoles himself with the thought that it could be worse: ‘better that than one of those pop singers or crooners or long-haired Beatles or whatever they call themselves’.

Christie’s answer to this clash of eras is to create Bertram’s Hotel in London, a self-consciously old-fashioned establishment that has been restored to its Edwardian splendour, and serves an appropriate bill of fare: afternoon tea comes with seed-cake and muffins. It’s the kind of place beloved of dowagers and deans, people who bemoan the inadequacy of modern sanitary fixtures. Beloved too of America tourists, who – says manager, Mr Humfries – go home enthusing to their friends: ‘It’s just like stepping back a hundred years. It just is old England!’ In short, reflects a police officer, ‘if there was one place in London that was absolutely above suspicion…’

Much of the story, then, is comfortably removed from modernity. There’s a formidable doorman at Bertram’s – ex-Irish Guards – and those who get past him find themselves seduced by the slightly soporific atmosphere, sinking into the overstuffed furniture as the butter sinks into their muffins. Even Miss Marple, up in town for a fotnight’s holiday, is less lively than normal.

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The central problem remains, however, for a novelist from the Golden Age of Detective Fiction: how to run a traditional sleuth when crime seems to be so organised these days, dominated by professional gangs. (The Great Train Robbery was still very much in the news, Ronnie Biggs having escaped from gaol earlier in 1965.) ‘Really!’ thinks Miss Marple. ‘Crime seemed to have got above itself.’

Does an elderly amateur have any part to play in this world, however experienced she is with poisonings?

Probably not. Miss Marple is mostly peripheral to the plot. The real sleuthing is done by Scotland Yard, though it’s mostly the work of DCI Davy, a man so venerable that he’s nicknamed ‘Father’ by his colleagues, and is seen as being almost as much a relic as Marple. ‘All right in his day,’ reflects another, less senior, officer, ‘but there are plenty of go-ahead chaps about who could do with some promotion, once the dead wood is cleared away.’

Instead, the spinster of St Mary Mead spends much of the book worrying about the impact on girls of modern parenting, with ‘mothers who were quite incapable of protecting their daughters from silly affairs, illegitimate babies, and early and unfortunate marriages’. A lawyer shares her view. ‘Girls don’t get looked after the way they used to be,’ he sighs.

She’s on safe ground here, and she’s right to stay out of the utterly implausible story of gangsters and doppelgangers. Because it doesn’t work. There are nods to underworld thrillers and to action-adventure television, while trying to stay faithful to the Golden Age tradition, and none of it hangs together. The old convention of the Least Likely Suspect makes no sense at all when we’re talking about professional bank-robbers.

It’s fun, though, and if it’s not one of Christie’s most celebrated works, it did well at the time. There was a late-night serialisation on the Home Service, and a set of good reviews, welcoming what the Birmingham Post called a ‘cosy and foreseeable, but beautifully told’ story. ‘In this sliding world,’ said the Liverpool Daily Post, ‘it’s pleasant to be able to remind one’s fellow old-fogies that yet again this year there’s a Christie for Christmas.’

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The ‘old fogies’ note is entirely apposite. The best element in the book concerns the dangerous allure of nostalgia among the elderly. Miss Marple is staying at Bertram’s because she has such happy memories of it when she was a girl, nearly sixty years ago. She wants to recapture the past, but is that possible? If so, then the time-frozen hotel is surely the right place for it. Except that Bertram’s isn’t the real thing, just a facsimile, a tourist-trap that employs actors to make the experience more convincing. And, inevitably since this is Christie, it turns out that it’s rotten to the core.

Miss Marple concludes ‘that one can never go back, that one should not ever try to go back – that the essence of life is going forward. Life is really a One Way Street, isn’t it?’ And later she reflects that while it may be true that plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose, it is equally true to say that plus c’est la même chose, plus ça change. Which feels like it’s the point of the book.

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see also:

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