Christie, Agatha -- 4.50 from Paddington / What Mrs McGillicuddy Saw! (1957)
Review by Nick Fuller
3/5
Late Christie and a dithery, fluttery Miss Marple who is only peripherally involved do not make a good combination. Although Miss Marple does some surveying and map-reading to discover the house where the body of the woman seen strangled on board a train has been hidden, she does not apply reason to the problem of the woman's identity and the two murders caused by a tontine will (two fairly standard ploys), but experiences a revelatory flash — not, of course, shared with the reader, who has no chance of spotting the culprit among the three surviving men. Note strong similarities with Hercule Poirot's Christmas.
Comments (1)
Jon said
at 8:58 am on Jan 27, 2010
Blurb: Having done her Christmas shopping, Mrs. McGillicuddy relaxes happily in a train. Then another train, going in the same direction, draws abreast and for some minutes the two trains proceed side by side. That has happened to all of us. But in a first-class carriage of the second train, Mrs. McGillicuddy sees, to her horror, a man strangling a woman… Then the second train gathers speed and vanishes into the night.
Who was the woman? Who was the man who strangled her? And why is the body not found for so long?
Once again Agatha Christie demonstrates the ingenuity and mastery which have made her the most famous of crime writers. Once again she presents a story that will grip every reader from its exciting and unusual opening to the convincing solution at the end.
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