Reviewing Agatha Christie's "A Murder is Announced"

I read A Murder is Announced by Agatha Christie in tandem with The Rosemary Tree. While thematically and stylistically different, the setting of 1950-something English small towns sometimes made me mix up the two.

In this Miss Marple mystery, several characters are introduced reading the paper in their separate homes, and finding the strangest announcement that a murder is to occur at Letitia Blacklock’s house at 6:30 that night. For some reason a ton of people decide to show up, assuming it’s a joke or theme party of some kind. But since this is Agatha Christie, we readers all know that no matter how frivolous the warning, the murder itself is dead serious.

There’s the motley assortment of personalities one expects when reading a Christie novel, all of which the reader is manipulated to suspect at one point or another. I wish I could take complete credit for figuring out the culprit (because I rarely do guess correctly, for all my elaborate theories before the Big Reveal), but to be honest I know I watched a PBS adaptation of this story years ago, and while the adaptations aren’t always true to the book, this was close enough that I may have stored the solution away in my latent memory.

In all this was one of the more enjoyable Marple mysteries I’ve read thus far, mostly because Miss Marple herself isn’t in too many scenes. While I usually like the novels, I am not a fan of Jane Marple as a character. Perhaps that’s another reason why I mentally blended this mystery with The Rosemary Tree; like Harriet Smith in that book, Miss Marple is almost too perfect to feel like a believable person, even compared to the other caricatures that populate the Christie literary world.