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A review by lesserjoke
4:50 from Paddington by Agatha Christie
4.0
A most delightful little mystery. I enjoy how author Agatha Christie plays with her usual formulae in this one, while still treating readers fairly with the facts and sticking firmly within the grand whodunnit tradition. As suggested by the novel's rather exclamatory US title What Mrs. McGillicuddy Saw!, the action begins with a setpiece that would likely inspire later works like The Girl on the Train: an elderly passenger happens to witness a murder in the cabin of a locomotive across from her, during the brief moment that the two trains are in sync on the tracks. She alerts the authorities at the next station, but no body can be discovered and the police don't seem to believe her wild story. Desperate, she passes the investigating baton to her good friend Miss Jane Marple, who subsequently takes over as protagonist -- before deciding that a more active presence is required and enlisting a plucky young acquaintance of her own to continue the search.
Beyond the three sequential heroines, there's also the fun nature of the puzzle(s) at the core of this text. Typically in a murder mystery, only the culprit is unknown, along with their exact means and motive. Here, the women must first deduce where the corpse has been hidden in order to prove that there's been a crime at all, and even then, the victim turns out to be a Jane Doe with no identification, which makes the hunt for her killer a far more difficult task. Nevertheless, the investigators are clever and capable, and they slowly manage to put everything together and catch the murderer in their net.
Throughout it all, Christie weaves her customary red herrings and amusing character sketches, and I'm impressed by how much of the apparent misdirection and stray detailing winds up relevant to the solution in the end. The suspect is neither too obvious nor too unlikely / removed from the plot, which is a balance the writer sometimes misjudges. It's overall one of the better entries in this series, albeit not one where Miss Marple is the undisputed star.
[Content warning for ableism.]
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Beyond the three sequential heroines, there's also the fun nature of the puzzle(s) at the core of this text. Typically in a murder mystery, only the culprit is unknown, along with their exact means and motive. Here, the women must first deduce where the corpse has been hidden in order to prove that there's been a crime at all, and even then, the victim turns out to be a Jane Doe with no identification, which makes the hunt for her killer a far more difficult task. Nevertheless, the investigators are clever and capable, and they slowly manage to put everything together and catch the murderer in their net.
Throughout it all, Christie weaves her customary red herrings and amusing character sketches, and I'm impressed by how much of the apparent misdirection and stray detailing winds up relevant to the solution in the end. The suspect is neither too obvious nor too unlikely / removed from the plot, which is a balance the writer sometimes misjudges. It's overall one of the better entries in this series, albeit not one where Miss Marple is the undisputed star.
[Content warning for ableism.]
Like this review?
--Throw me a quick one-time donation here!
https://ko-fi.com/lesserjoke
--Subscribe here to support my writing and weigh in on what I read next!
https://patreon.com/lesserjoke
--Follow along on Goodreads here!
https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/6288479-joe-kessler
--Or click here to browse through all my previous reviews!
https://lesserjoke.home.blog