Marply

I'm getting close to having read all of the Miss Marple novels; no incredibly great feat, since there are only about thirteen of them -- but still a milestone. They span Agatha Christie's career -- being fairly evenly spaced throughout -- so one gets a sense of how her writing style changed and progressed. In all honesty, I think I prefer her earlier novels... but the one I just finished, The Mirror Crack'd, was still pretty good despite being placed in the latter half of her career.

I think one of the problems with books written by the older Christie (at least, as I've experienced them so far) is that the characters in her novels lost something of their vibrancy as she got older. And her plots got a bit less creative. In the earlier novels, there was something of a quality of striving for originality -- but as time went on, one gets to the point where one picks up on certain clues and is able to say, "Oh, this is going to be like that other one..."

But since Christie wrote fifty-zillion books, she is probably justified in their being a little samey at times.  One runs into the same thing with Wodehouse.

As I said, The Mirror Crack'd did a fairly decent job of avoiding the problems of some of the earlier ones. Oh, it had the issue that many of the others had (the fact that there wasn't very much Miss Marple in this Miss Marple novel) -- and although I did guess the correct murderer in chapter two, I didn't guess the motive until the ending, so it completely succeeded as a mystery novel. It kept me guessing all along and kept me reading -- which is all that one can ask out of this sort of thing. -- Mrs. Hall