Paul Haspel's Reviews > A Caribbean Mystery

A Caribbean beach resort provides a sunny oceanside setting for a grim series of murders in Agatha Christie’s 1964 novel A Caribbean Mystery. This book is the tenth of twelve novels that featured Christie’s Miss Jane Marple character; and in A Caribbean Mystery, as in its predecessors and successors, Miss Marple uses her considerable powers of observation and inference to investigate murder most foul, and to bring a murderer to justice.

Agatha Christie, D.B.E. (Dame of the British Empire), needs very little introduction. Her 66 novels and 14 short-story collections have made her, according to the Guinness Book of World Records, the best-selling fiction writer ever, with over 2 billion copies of her books having been sold. Her novel And Then There Were None (1939-40) has sold more than 100 million copies all by itself, and is currently listed as the 4th best-selling book of all time. UNESCO states that Christie is the most translated author in the world. Her play The Mousetrap (1952) is the longest-running play in the history of stage drama; now that a COVID-induced pause in performances has ended, you can still go and see it on London’s West End. What all of this adds up to is that Christie was a hard-working author who knew how to tell a story in a way that would appeal to generations of readers throughout the world.

The novels for which Christie was best-known were generally those that featured two fictional detectives – Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple. While the conventions behind the Poirot novels were sometimes hard for me to take – because, really, who’s going to wait to commit a murder until the scene of the prospective crime is graced by an irascible but brilliant Belgian detective who has never failed to solve a case? – the Miss Marple novels always had a touch more believability to me, because of the way they critique societal attitudes toward women.

We live, after all, in a world where women are all too often objectified while they are “young” and then ignored once they are “old.” Miss Jane Marple, as an unmarried older woman from the fictional village of St. Mary Mead, knows that many of the people around her will more or less instantly dismiss her as a “spinster” with nothing important or interesting to offer. Therefore, when a murder occurs, she can ask questions about people and offer her own observations, knowing all the while that she will be seen as nothing more than a chattering “old lady.”

The knitting that she is always carrying during her investigations turns out to be an effective form of camouflage for this tough-minded and canny detective, as is the effortless way she takes on the pose of the dotty and somewhat out-of-it “old lady.” The narrator remarks at one point that “Miss Marple had been brought up to have a proper regard for truth and was indeed by nature a very truthful person. But on certain occasions, when she considered it her duty to do so, she could tell lies with a really astonishing verisimilitude” (p. 27). Her complexity makes Miss Marple a pleasant travelling companion.

As A Caribbean Mystery begins, Miss Marple is already a guest at the Golden Palm Hotel on the (fictional) island of St. Honoré. She has travelled there at the insistence and the expense of her nephew Raymond, who has been concerned about Miss Marple’s health ever since she suffered a bad case of pneumonia at home in England the summer before. One Major Palgrave, an elderly gentleman who has attached himself to her so that he can tell her stories of his service in various exotic locations, casually mentions that he knows a story of a murderer who got away with their crime, and even offers to show her a photo of the murderer – before suddenly looking shocked and putting away the photograph. Fans of this genre, and regular readers of Christie’s work, will not be shocked to learn that a murder occurs shortly afterward.

The conventions of the genre demand that there be a wide range of suspects who could plausibly have committed the murder; Christie obligingly provides a baker’s dozen or so, every one of whom makes a point of behaving in a profoundly suspicious manner at one point or another in the story. Revelations abound regarding these suspects as the novel progresses: adultery, conspiracy, financial and legal troubles of varying kinds. And Miss Marple, as she had done nine times before in Christie’s literary career, sets herself to the task of finding out just who the murderer is. Fortunately, she is a master of the art of using “twittering conversation” (p. 59) to get her co-respondents to reveal, in conversation, things they might have done better to conceal. As Miss Marple herself puts it, a little over halfway through the novel, “Conversations are always dangerous, if you have something to hide” (p. 136).

Miss Marple shows a good deal of guile in the way she prompts people to provide revelations through what may initially seem like nothing more than gossip. She knows that old ladies face the stereotype of being “gossipy,” and therefore – often but not exclusively with women informants – she plays the gossip’s part in order to elicit important information.

When speaking with one Miss Prescott, for example, about a young woman on the beach, Miss Marple quickly makes a point of agreeing with Miss Prescott that the woman’s blonde hair is dyed: “She looked at Miss Prescott and they both nodded with quiet female assurance” (p. 150). When Miss Prescott’s brother, an Anglican canon, scolds the women for gossiping, “The two women sat in silence. They were rebuked, and in deference to their training they deferred to the criticism of a man. But inwardly they were frustrated, irritated, and quite unrepentant. Miss Prescott threw a frank glance of irritation toward her brother. Miss Marple took out her knitting and looked at it” (p. 152).

And when Canon Prescott is called away, a few moments later, it should be no surprise that Miss Prescott is quite ready to keep sharing information with Miss Marple – information that moves Miss Marple closer to a solution to the mystery.

Some of the more pleasant surprises of A Caribbean Mystery, for me, came not from drawing-room revelations or questions of “who done it,” but rather from details of how Miss Marple responds to different moments of promise or setback in her investigation. When detectives like Edgar Allan Poe’s C. Auguste Dupin, or Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, make crime-solving look effortless – “Aha! I have it! Follow me!” – there is little for the reader to do but follow along, like each detective’s puzzled assistant. Miss Marple, by contrast, suffers some engaging moments of doubt during her quest for the truth.

Feeling, at one point, that her investigation has reached an impasse – that another murder is about to be committed, and that there is no one on St. Honoré who can help her to prevent that second murder from happening – the quietly but devoutly religious Miss Marple (who keeps Thomas à Kempis’s The Imitation of Christ by her bedside and reads from it each night) finds herself appealing for something akin to divine intervention:

Miss Marple, feeling rather like a humble deputy of the Almighty, almost cried aloud her need in Biblical phrasing.

Who will go for me?

Whom shall I send? (p. 118)

And it is just then that another character, who has hitherto seemed thoroughly disagreeable, emerges, quite unexpectedly, as a courageous, empathetic, and dependable ally to Miss Marple. This new ally helps move the investigation forward, though sometimes even he gets things wrong – as when he tells Miss Marple that he doesn’t think she has much experience with murder and murderers. “In this assumption, as Miss Marple could have told him, he was wrong. But she forbore to contest his statement. Gentlemen, she knew, did not like to be put right in their facts” (p. 132). And thus our heroine, decades before the coining of the term, deals with “mansplaining.”

I also appreciated the reflections, throughout the novel, on what it means to age – on aging as an individual and a social process. Miss Marple and her ally, both of whom are older people, talk about how the will to live strengthens as one ages. As Miss Marple puts it,

“Life is more worth living, more full of interest, when you are likely to lose it. It shouldn’t be, perhaps, but it is. When you’re young and strong and healthy, and life stretches ahead of you, living isn’t really important at all. It’s young people who commit suicide easily, out of despair from love, sometimes from sheer anxiety and worry. But old people know how valuable life is, and how interesting.” (p. 137)

Interesting, indeed. Dame Agatha was 74 years old when she wrote A Caribbean Mystery; no doubt she reflected at times that if she wasn’t Agatha Christie, the Agatha Christie, many people would overlook or ignore or belittle her as an “old woman,” the way characters in Christie novels often ignore or overlook or belittle Miss Marple. I am 62 years old, as I make my way through A Caribbean Mystery for the first time. Those reflections on aging spoke to me.

Miss Marple is willing to confront and refute her own prior preconceptions – at one crucial point, she says, “I have been foolish. Extremely foolish. I ought to have known from the very beginning what all this was about. It was so simple” (p. 200) – and on that note A Caribbean Mystery moves toward the detection and apprehension of the murderer.

I read A Caribbean Mystery on a Caribbean cruise. Visiting a series of Caribbean destinations – Barbados, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Martinique, Guadeloupe, Antigua and Barbuda, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Sint Maarten, Saint-Martin – I noticed a number of beachside resorts that looked very much as though they could have been the locale for Christie’s novel. It made me wonder how many winter-time escapees from Great Britain and Ireland, from the United States and Canada, from Australia and New Zealand, may have enjoyed reading A Caribbean Mystery at beachside or poolside, or on a cruise ship's observation deck – quite a few, I would warrant.

Citizens of the modern nations of the Caribbean, by contrast, might find themselves looking elsewhere for their readings about the Caribbean – looking to books by Caribbean writers, books that deal with the region’s enduring problems of poverty, political corruption, income inequality, and the grim legacy of slavery and colonialism. What Christie gives us here is very much a visitor’s Caribbean, a tourist’s Caribbean – a vacation read; Caribbean characters, in this Caribbean novel, are generally relegated to the margins. A Caribbean Mystery fits firmly into a well-defined category of entertainment literature. Yet it is a salutary thing if the reader knows that there are other books out there that delve far, far more deeply into what it means to live one’s life in the Caribbean Basin.