British murder spree! part 3

I've always had something of an ambivalent attitude towards Agatha Christie's oeuvre. Yes, she essentially created the modern British mystery genre, but at the same time her most famous of sleuths (Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot) can be seen as something of cliches. But putting aside such misconceptions, Christie's work still stands as landmarks in the genre. And although the Poirot and Marple novels are her best known works, she did write a considerable number of mysteries that didn't feature either detective.

I came to The Sittaford Mystery (also published as The Murder at Hazelmoor) after seeing the film version recently produced by PBS. I'm glad I decided to read the book: save the names of the characters and the setting (a village in England's west country), the plot is almost entirely different and much more satisfactory, in my opinion. The story starts out simply enough: snowbound and bored, some villagers conduct a seance, where it is revealed that the wealthiest resident of the village is dead. Alarmed, his best friend sets out across the snow to check on him, arriving to find him blugeoned to death. A ner'do-well nephew set to inherit the estate is arrested, and the case appears closed. But then that nephew's fiancee Emily appears, determined to release her hapless future husband and find the real culprit.

It's too bad that Christie didn't write more mysteries with Emily Trefusis as the main detective, as Emily's mix of independence, vivaciousness and dogged persistence would have made for an interesting series. With the help of a somewhat unscrupulous journalist, Emily learns enough of the villagers' secrets to find the real murderer. Christie's murders may not be entirely suspenseful (how, exactly, does someone die from being slugged by a sandbag?) but tightly wound plots and a solution that requires careful deduction on the part of her detectives makes Christie's mysteries still appealing even after 70 years in print.