I’ve been struggling to enjoy my reading of late, so it was something of a relief to revisit The Sittaford Mystery (1931) by Agatha Christie and find it so enjoyable.  We’re probably in the lower half of Christie’s second-tier work here, but for a relatively early book it shows a lot of promise, goes about its simple story well, and doesn’t try to get too clever in doing what it does.  Yes, she would go on to write much, much better works in the decade that followed, but taken on its own terms this is a good little mystery which gives a sense of how far the young Agatha had come in her career, and hints at the maven she would soon be recognised as.

A social gathering at Sittaford House on the edge of snowbound Dartmoor takes a turn for the sinister when a fun game of table-turning divulges the message from ‘the other side’ that Captain Trevelyan, Sittaford’s owner, has been murdered. Major Burnaby, unsettled by this turn of events, traipses through the snow to nearby Exhampton — where Trevelyan is staying while South African Mrs. Willett and her daughter Violet rent Sittaford — only to discover that his friend has indeed been murdered…and that, at first glance, the medical evidence places his death at about the same time that the spirits were giving up their message…

There’s much to enjoy about this novel, which sees Christie spread her wings into an imperfectly-realised supernatural milieu, and builds on the self-referential nature of Partners in Crime (1929) by having every development greeted by some variation on “But, of course, if this were a detective story…”. True, the plotting is a little uninspired — lots of interviews, a night-time sojourn, then lots more interviews — but there’s a lightness of touch in events that finds fleet feet in the wittier side of Christie’s social observations:

“I’ve read some really amazing things in the Daily Wire — things you wouldn’t credit if a newspaper didn’t print them.”

“Are they any more to be credited on that account?” inquired Mr. Rycroft acidly.

Emily Trefusis, brought into events by her fiancée being accused of the crime, is another great, capable Christie young woman who takes all in her stride and, one womanly instance of emoting aside, proves more than up to the task. She’s abetted by journalist Charles Enderby, on site through serendipity alone, and paralleled by the solid Inspector Narracott, who is able to do officially what she cannot, and the three of them visit the various denizens — a mixture of the well-drawn and the completely forgettable, revealing an aspect of Christie’s craft that isn’t quite up to standard yet — and gradually inch towards the truth.

It passes very agreeably, even if some threads (a convict escaping from the nearby Princeton prison, say, or the curiously absent Mr. Duke) feel rather more redundant than they should. On the plus side, some of the clewing is really quite spectacularly brazen — with this second reading I really did wonder how she got away with some of what you’re told…goddamn, the woman really wasn’t afraid to declare her clues — and, even if characters like Miss Percehouse have nothing to do, some of the people are charming and fun to spend time with. Some light touches with history, like the generational divide introduced by the Great War, make the setting feel rather more lived in, too, and show a novelist on the rise.

The central trick in this fooled me completely first time around, and, while a little more speculation might have put me on the right path, on second reading I can see how I simply got swept along on the tide of Christie’s playfulness. You can cavil that the central scheme doesn’t work, but if it hadn’t then the book wouldn’t have happened as it did — a lovely moment sees Emily reflecting that “one could write a gruesome little story” based around one possible solution. While not, as suggested above, in the same rank as Christie’s masterpieces, this still feels like an important work in her development, and manages clever things with notable confidence, the success of which would set her on the path to greatness.

Put, too, in the context of my recent reading agonies, it’s lovely to just enjoy a book all the way through. I doubt I’ve turned a corner, whatever I review next week will probably give me a hard time trying to mow through the pages, but for now I’m grateful and happy to move on to (hopefully) better things without asking too many questions whose answers are likely only to remove the fun from proceedings. And if that doesn’t encapsulate The Sittaford Mystery, I don’t know what does.