After 41 years, 12 novels, and 20 short stories, Nemesis (1971) represents the end of the road for Agatha Christie and her spinster detective Miss Jane Marple. Marple herself would survive her creator in the posthumously-published Sleeping Murder (1976), but since that was written decades prior — and the collection Miss Marple’s Final Cases (1979) consists of uncollected stories from much earlier in Christie’s career — this the final time they would have together.
It’s arguably more difficult to chart Chrisite’s relationship with Miss Marple than it is with Poirot. You can feel the author becoming increasingly disenchanted with her little Belgian as her career hits about 1950. Poirot was an increasingly desultory presence in his own books — cropping up as close to the end as possible, to allow Christie the space to explore new ideas, or maybe just so she didn’t have to spend quite so long looking at him — and his coterie of tics and quirks left him feeling increasingly displaced without ever explicitly addressing it. The weirdest experience of Christie’s writing for me is still the picture of Hercule Poirot in a greasy spoon cafe in Third Girl (1966), and the concept of his existing in a world full of Brutalist architecture and poky, grimy blocks of flats is simply too great a mental dissonance for my brain to even begin to process.
In contrast, as Christie aged she seemed to develop more purpose for her spinster detective. That same year of 1950 saw the publication of what many consider to be the pinnacle of the Marple oeuvre with A Murder is Announced (1950), and that’s still in the first half of the eventual Marple canon. Indeed, it would have been difficult to even talk about Marple as one of Christie’s ‘regular’ sleuths in 1950, as she had by that point published as many books featuring Aunt Jane as she had the oft-overlooked Superintendent Battle to whom she would never return besides a sly casual wink. Frequently, Christie was happy for Aunt Jane to conduct things from the sidelines or the back seat — third novel The Moving Finger (1942), the sixth A Pocketful of Rye (1953), and the seventh 4.50 from Paddington (1957) — and if Poirot remained largely unchanged in his outlook, Marple reflected on the unstoppable advance of Progress in The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side (1962) and the steady fading into obsolescence of the Old Ways in A Caribbean Mystery (1964) and At Bertram’s Hotel (1965).
To put this in approximate context, see the graphic below — it indicates the books Christie had published up to and including Nemesis by main sleuth. Broadly:
Green = Poirot
Red = Marple
Blue = Tommy & Tuppence
Yellow = Battle
Black = Standalone
Every tenth book is designated with an arrow above it (for no other reason than to help wth counting) and decades are shown beneath. Click on the image to make it bigger. Please. It took me freakin’ ages to make.
My thoughts on those individual Marple titles can be found at the links above, and I firmly believe Christie had more and more sympathy for and interest in the old girl as she herself aged and began to share the experiences that Miss Marple was to encounter: not simply curtailed freedom and ability, but also being viewed as “an old pussy” who is out of date and can easily be dismissed as harmless and of no interest to younger, brasher types. And so what of Nemesis, the last book Christie would write, and being written at a time when author and character have the most in common with each other?
Well, the book itself exists at a difficult time. Recently, resident Christie expert Brad vouchsafed the notion of trying to sort Christie’s works into eras, and while her Experimental and Peak periods may be up for some debate, there was a uniform acknowledgement that we’re very much in the downturn of Christie’s career by 1971. I’ve found positive things to enjoy in Endless Night (1967) and Hallowe’en Party (1969), but will freely acknowledge that By the Pricking of My Thumbs (1968) is — kindly — uneven and ill-focussed, and Passenger to Frankfurt (1970) is a hot garbage fire spilling noxious fumes into any room that contains it. So even if Christie wants to say something about Miss Marple, does she retain the necessary skill or mental acuity to do so?
Man, this is the problem with writing about someone when you’ve read 74 of their books; laying out the context takes a while.
Undeniably it’s a book with problems, not least of which is that it needs a serious edit. Anyone approaching this in an experimental frame of mind could probably start reading at chapter 5, and skip out chapters 8 and 22 in their entirety. And yet should it be so surprising that, if this is the last time Christie is to spend with her grande dame, she gets a little mawkish, a little drawn out? Yes, too many details are dwelt upon to very little consequence, but it feels tremendously loving — like someone telling a meandering story about a dead parent purely so that they can pull out and reminisce over all the details which made that person special to them. Christie knows how the Miss Marple story ends, but this is her ending now, and she is going to delay that last goodbye for a while, so as to enjoy the company of an old friend one last time.
I had my concerns following Passenger to Frankfurt, because the writing in that book is so loose and languid, occasioning only fleeting glimpses of the talent which once poured out of Christie’s pages. However, Nemesis is superbly written — I mean, really superbly, with a positive cavalcade of arch asides, blankly witty prose, and aching reflection crammed together in a way that this series only really adopted in its latter stages. The Christie of Passenger to Frankfurt struck me as thoroughly incapable of writing…
“Mamie is very sensitive to atmospheres,” said her husband proudly to those around him. “Why, once when we were in an old house down in Louisiana…”
The narrative of Mamie’s special sensitivity got into its swing and Miss Marple and one or two others seized their opportunity to edge gently out of the room and down the exquisitely moulded staircase to the ground floor.
…or of possessing enough humour to have a character wheedle information out of a vinagerish post mistress with the following observation:
Mrs. Vinegar was looking quite kindly now, touched by Miss Marple’s patent incapacity and general state of senility and dither.
Or, indeed, even of Miss Marple playing up to the perception of her as a gently senile, dithering old boot when those loquacious opening chapters have her saying “Good morning, Edward” to the St. Mary Mead taxi driver “whose actual name was George”. There is here far more talent and understatement than was evident in the entirety of that preceding novel, capturing other characters in equally blithe asides — such as certain members of the tour party Miss Marple finds herself on viewing the death of one of the other members as an accident because “it was more comfortable that way”, or the slightly fustily prim interplay of the solicitors Mr. Broadribb and Mr. Schuster — that previous evidence would have placed beyond Christie’s capabilities.
It’s true that the plot lacks Christie’s typical tightness in construction, and that her misdirection falls painfully obviously into one of the gambits so perfectly summarised by Noah recently. The idea of Miss Marple fulfilling the posthumous wishes of an old acquaintance in being sent on a bus tour of the stately homes of England with the vague notion of detecting and correcting some long-forgotten misdeed is necessarily loose, and the structuring of this investigation gives us a bus party of some fifteen people to get to know before we end up in a side venture that may or may not have something to do with this request. You’re not entirely sure if you should be looking at her fellow travellers, at the three sisters who offer to put her up, or even elsewhere at some of the people who surround this scheme (precisely what is Miss Cooke up to, after all?). I can see a lot of criticism surrounding the somewhat nebulous nature of this novel, and yet it’s one of the things which I enjoyed the most.
The plot here is not about the plot per se, it’s not about the clever scheme Christie has cooked up to shanghai and misdirect you. The plot here is far more about Miss Jane Marple’s tremendous acuity for evil and how she responds and acts when faced with situations that strike her as falling under that category. Indeed, that’s all Jane Marple was ever about. Certainly she would seek to impose herself in certain investigations, but the Marple books have always been far more concerned with the notion of evil, how it presents itself, and what sort of response can be mustered in response.
She looked round the church in which she was sitting. It looked so peaceful. The reality of Evil was hard to believe in. A flair for Evil — that was what Mr. Rafiel had attributed to her. She rose and walked out of the church and stood looking round the churchyard again. Here, amongst the gravestones and their worn inscriptions, no sense of Evil moved in her.
Was it Evil she had sensed yesterday at the Old Manor House? That deep depression of despair, that dark desperate grief. Anthea Bradbury-Scott , her eyes gazing fearfully back over one shoulder, as though fearing some presence that stood there — always stood there — behind her.
“I would not set myself up as a good judge of people,” she says later. “If you think I know all about what I am supposed to be doing here, you are wrong”. And then, later in that same conversation: “I do not like evil beings who do evil things”. Undeniably a sense of evil — not of the people, but of the deed — is what motivates Marple in these cases, playing on the words of John Stuart Mill that “bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing”. Sensing evil, proving evil, and being unable to do nothing when presented with the proof, was something that Christie developed far more readily as her career wore on — everything from A Caribbean Mystery onwards is built around this essential theme — and never more successfully than in this closing tranche of Marples.
“A fishing expedition where the fish did not rise” is how Christie herself phrases this structure, and for the intended outcome it is the perfect way for Jane Marple to go about her task. If there is no evil there to be detected — if the basis on which she is sent on this trip is false hope — she will not detect it. In not being told who to look out for or what she is investigating, her natural nose for the wrongness in human nature is being left to find what scent will inevitably remains if it ever existed. She is, as the title betokens her, Nemesis, to be set upon a righteous track and to see it through to the end. And when we reach the conclusion — a murder committed out of nothing more pure than love — it’s a devastating, heart-breaking reveal of the ways Evil has been able to twist something and someone into a shape never intended, and it feels right that Miss Marple is the one to uncover it. Hercule Poirot’s tics, thinly masking his creator’s disdain for him, would have no place undercutting the horror of this solution.
The Invisible Event 
Great review JJ – you are giving it much more credit than I ever had but … it’s been decades since I read it and I really enjoyed your take on it chum. You know I love BY THE PRICKING but the later stuff after than one I find sad and hard to take. But this one I may now re-read. Cheers!
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I’m not going to claim that everything in thisrun of later Christies is excellent — Third Girl I barely remember, Pricking I don’t especially know what the plot is, Frankfurt is meandering and problematic on every page — but the ones that I have enjoyed are definitely possessed of something of the old Christie magic, and where there’s material to kick against the “every Christie past 196x is awful” accepted wisdom I intend to kick very hard indeed 🙂
I can see the difficulties in this — it has zero misdirection in the classical sense, and the plot is short-story thin, but as an almost wanderlust-y, languid meander through the last years of an old friend, dude it is difficult to want to deprive Christie of the success of that experience.
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Fair enough JJ but … you are clearly inclined to be very generous. My feeling remains that there is value up to the end of the 1960s but that’s it. Of the four she wrote in the 70s NEMESIS is the one I read longest ago and do will give the benefit of the doubt. The other three I remember well as being dreadful by any objective standard, however.
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That’s the beauty of books though, eh? We all come at them from different previous places and with different previous experiences. Feel free to remember Nemesis as a pile of turds if that’s how it struck you — I’m in no way claiming the definitive opinion 🙂 If I’d read it ten years ago, I’d probably have spent the last decade telling everyone what a pile of turds it is, but as I get older and my knees start creaking, I’m more inclined to look favourably upon the failing efforts of the later years of someone who dedicated a huge amount to, and innovated so much within, the birth and growth of the genre.
And, hey, Frankfurt is a pile of turds, so it’s not like I’m cimpletely blind ot her flaws!
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I know what you ate getting at and I more than sympathise… though by the same logic you perhaps should be even tougher given just how steep the quality drop is. Time for a Christie top 75 I suspect 😉
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Ha. In at number 14: Black Coffee…
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Yeah elephants can remember is no nemesis unfortunately but still better than passenger to Frankfurt – though it is hard to know what could be worse than that last one! I have quite a soft spot for Nemesis, so I am glad you enjoyed it too.
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As for what would be worse than “Passenger to Frankfurt”, I direct you towards “Postern of Fate”.
Otherwise, I agree. Both “Nemesis” and “Elephants Can Remember” are at least readable, if not novels that you should use to introduce someone to Agatha Christie. The other two are hardly readable at all.
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I’m girding my loins somewhat for the experience of Postern given how rambling and loose and lost I found Pricking, and how bizarre Frankfurt turned out to be. But that’s okay, as only three pairs of Christie remain: a pair of late and apparently much weaker novels, a pair of collectioned short story anthologies from earlier in her career, and a pair of “finishing” novels from (possibly) much earlier during her peak. Split up in that way, it becomes a sort of social experiment from here.
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At least Elephants has Mrs. Oliver in it. Small comfort because the rest is a bust. And Sleeping Murder is perfectly fine, B- grade Miss Marple.
I have only read Postern of Fate once in my life. I was eighteen years old. I think if any time would be appropriate to re-read it, it would be alongside a good buddy feeling the pain for the first time. I might even get more out of it now that I’m a whole lot stronger and strangely only a little bit older! So if your up for a little international hand holding, let me know when you’re ready and we can tackle this together.
Absolutely NO rush!!
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Yeah, a “Holy hell, what’s going on with Postern of Fate?” post could be fun — anything to potentially liven up a sad decline for a great writer. I’ll keep you posted…
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I enjoyed Elephants Can Remember when I was ten, and gave it to my father to read. He looked at me strangely, and told me it was awful.
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I was a litle reticent to see what others thought of this, because I don’t deny its flaws but I also don’t feel they sink it to the extent that could be levelled at the book. This “every late Christie is terrible” pervasive attitude seems to be somehwat half-heartedly thrown about where certain books are concerned, and in failing to appreciate the context I think I huge amount is lost. No, this should no be anyone’s first Christie if they intend to read her further, but it has a tremendous number of other qualities, and after 19 years of reading her I’m now more delighted than ever to have reached this chronologically and so experienced it at its best.
And, thaknfully, saner heads like you and Brad exist to shower a bit of love on it, too. Eventually, someone might even listen to us…
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Well, I think yours was a loving tribute to this problematic novel. Every so often, I pop the audiobook into my car and enjoy traveling around with two old ladies that have loved for years: Miss Marple, of course, and the brilliant Joan Hickson. All those fluffy ditherings and rambling memories spouted by the best interpreter ever of the character make even the toughest sections of Nemesis a lovely experience!
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You say Joan Hickson is the best interpreter of the character like there’s ever been another actress who has played Jane Marple. There was that woman in The Sittaford Mystery called “Jane Marple”, but I figured that was some sort of clumsy homage since it’s not a Marple novel and so she’s can’t be in it, and on British TV there has been a spate of televised murder mystries confusingly bearing the titles of Christie’s Marple books but actually turning out to have different plots and endings. So…sure, Hickson’s the best because there hasn’t been another one. And even if there had been about 50 of them, she’d still wipe the floor with all of them.
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I had such high hopes for Angela Lansbury, yet she was all wrong. Helen Hayes was lively and . . . all wrong, too. Margaret Rutherford was hilarious . . . and A.W.! I think Geraldine McEwan and Julia MacKenzie are both fine actresses who were (mostly) done in by those awful adaptations. But neither one came close to the inimitable Joan.
Ooh! Ooh! I forgot to ask: Can you get t-shirts with the bar graph on them made for when I come to London? I think it should be the uniform for all Men Who Explained Mirackes – even guest stars. 😎
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Well, it should really be a shirt of all the books up to MMFC, right? Seems a shame to stop six short.
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Yes, of course – the whole megilla!
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Wasn’t that a Power Rangers villain?
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Angela Lansbury’s Miss Marple smoked in the adaptation of “The Mirror Crack’d”. All wrong, nothing like Miss Marple at all. To me, Lansbury’s performance as Miss Marple seems a bit similar to Salome Otterborne from 1978’s Death on the Nile. Definitely didn’t embody the role like Joan Hickson.
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I feel the same wy about Ustinov’s Poirot — sure, give the character the name, but without so many of the characteristics it’s really not the same thing at all. You start to realise how much of this is in the individual’s head when you see these portrayls get it so “wrong”…!
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Lovely review. Nemesis will always be very special to me because it’s one of a few Christies that I loved very deeply when I first started reading her work at about 11 years old. Some of the ones that resonated were true classics, others were Postern of Fate. But at the time, I was apprehensive at leaving children’s books (i.e., childhood) behind and entering an adult world that didn’t hold much interest for me. Christie showed me how much was out there in the world to discover, both good and bad.
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Ha, yeah, as transistions go into “grown up” reading one could do so much worse. I read Tom Clancy as my first “proper” author and was proably put off older people’s books as a result. In fact, I shall also blame that experience for the general sense of immaturity I am clinging to through my adult life, too. And my tinnitus. And my lousy diet. Goddamn Clear and Present Danger. I should sue.
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But on the plus side, you are so well-prepared to take on the Russians! Who knew that would still be a relevant skill-set?
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Good point;every cloud!
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Lovely article!
Nemesis is Christie’s Shepherd’s Crown – her farewell to a much-loved, indomitable old woman.
It’s also MYTHIC. Miss Marple as Nemesis. The three sisters = the Fates – Clotho, Lachesis, Atropos. (I bet I know, too, what poison was used.) Verity Hunt: the search for truth. Sleeping Beauty (put to sleep under roses, by…). Miss Temple and Archdeacon Brabazon: the forces of righteousness.
“Everything from A Caribbean Mystery onwards is built around this essential theme…” Thoughts on The Pale Horse?
A chap on the old Yahoo group thought Nemesis was the best Miss Marple (and maybe the best Christie).
I like the graph. You’re going to kill me, but … isn’t Murder by Easy a Superintendent Battle novel?
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Battle only has a cameo appearance in ‘Murder is easy’ so perhaps that’s why JJ considered it standalone . Also, ‘Cards on the table’ should be green & yellow. 🙂
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I considered that, but Cards on the Table is typically seen as a Hercule Poirot novel — the other books with Ariadne Oliver alongide him are classified as “his” novels, and Battle doesn’t do a lot (and Johnny Race disappears quick-sharp!). I toyed with making it a dual colour bar, I really did, but decided against it as the battle books are the ones where he’s front and centre in the investigation stakes, and here he’s a quiet and out-of-tune third fiddle.
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Thanks, Nick — delightful when someone sees a level of intelligence in my writing that I’m throroughly incapable of having provided 🙂
The Pale Horse and Tey Do It with Mirrors are equally an expansion of the same theme, but they’re separated from this later tranche by The Clocks which is about approximately nothing and so ruined the run. I remember being very impressed with how mundane (in a GOOD way!) Chistie made the source of the horrors in Pale Horse — whether it was a lack of skill in that trypoe of writing, or whether it was simply a dersire to deliberately make it everyday and humdrum as a basis of a mystery, it’s a book that has stayed with me in many regards. One I wish I’d been bloggin when I read it, because it would have been nice to write down my thoughts on it at the time.
Neil’s correct: Battle is barely in Murder is Easy — a brief thumbs up at the end? Bah!
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For a few minutes I thought I was reading a guest post by Brad!
It’s always nice to discover that there’s something to savor in the less respected books by an author. The Hungry Goblin by JDC wasn’t the horror people have made it out to be, and it had a enough subtle references to Carr’s past books that it made me wonder if it was a conscious farewell.
Of course, I’m currently 1/5 of the way through Papa La-bas right now and it is a pure trudge. We’ll see if there is anything to salvage there…
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By the way, your twitter feed no longer shows in the side bar. Not sure if that is just me…
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Huh, thanks. Shall check it out at some point; don’t want people missing out on that sweet, sweet content…
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Hungry Goblin will be my last Carr, and I’m fascinated to see what it does. Papa La-Bas…yeah, no, I do not remember that one fondly.
And, poor Brad, being impugned by likening my turgid literary style to his joyous effervescence whenever he gets going on Christie. Ooof, hes not going to like that…
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I think quite a bit of Nemesis. But also I am very stupid. It balances out.
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This is such a beautiful review JJ, it has me welling up a bit. There is something very special about the last novels of a crime writer, maybe more so than any other genre. The fact that a good detective novelist has to (necessarily) write a lot of content, means that it feels like such a huge weight when it’s all over.
I love this idea that Marple and Christie have caught up with one another in terms of their experience, or maybe always saw herself as Marple in a funny way.
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Great graphic.
I recall not liking Nemesis much. I must have read it when it was new.
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Great review! Hit me hard emotionally. Always had a special place for Nemesis as it was my first Marple and second Christie.
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Weird how we reserve fondness for our early encounters with authors, even though we may come to realise those books may not be the most representative or enduring of their works, isn’t it? I wonder if I was to go back through and look at my first encounters with authors down the years, how they’d stack up now…
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