Christie, Agatha - Nemesis (1971)

Review by Nick Fuller

3/5

In the last Miss Marple detective story, a sequel to the 1965 A Caribbean Mystery, an elderly and rheumatic Miss Marple is an unlikely Nemesis. Employed (with money) by the late Mr. Rafiel, she finds herself a passenger on a coach tour of "Famous Houses and Gardens of Great Britain," where she suspects everybody of something or other, her suspicions confirmed when a member of the party is crushed by a rock. As with all late Christie novels, the pace is very leisurely, and there are too many digressions; although Miss Marple had been forbidden by her doctor from gardening, somebody should have done some pruning to the book. The dialogue is often as dithery as Miss Marple herself, circumlocutory, digressive, and prone to errors, which reveals the author's growing senility. The plot is a rehash of The Body in the Library and the posthumously-published Sleeping Murder, but weaker than both. There are too few suspects for any mystification to be attempted, and there is little actual detection. Instead of applying logic, Miss Marple achieves her results by what she describes as "feeling ... based on a kind of emotional reaction or susceptibility to—well, I can only call it atmosphere." There are, however, clues, so this isn't a repeat performance of The Amazing Psychic Jane Nemesis, Elderly Spinster and Clairvoyante Extraordinaire, who made her highly unwelcome appearance in 4:50 from Paddington and "Greenshaw's Folly".

The book bears more than a passing resemblance to the works of Gladys Mitchell ("De gustibus non est disputandum;—that is, there is no disputing against HOBBY-HORSES; and, for my part, I seldom do"). The coach-tour / travelogue setting is a commonplace in Gladys Mitchell novels; the emphasis on unburying a crime hidden in the past and the presence of a psychiatric advisor to the Home Office are all Mitchell traits. The lawyer Brodribb is clearly a reference to R. Austin Freeman.