Nemesis - Agatha Christie [106]
12. Nemesis (1971)
Even the unflappable Miss Marple is astounded as she reads the letter addressed to her on instructions from the recently deceased tycoon Mr Jason Rafiel, whom she had met on holiday in the West Indies (A Caribbean Mystery). Recognising in her a natural flair for justice and a genius for crime-solving, Mr Rafiel has bequeathed to Miss Marple a £20,000 legacy — and a legacy of an entirely different sort. For he has asked Miss Marple to investigate…his own murder. The only problem is, Mr Rafiel has failed to name a suspect or suspects. And, whoever they are, they will certainly be determined to thwart Miss Marple’s inquiries — no matter what it will take to stop her.
Of note: Nemesis is the last Jane Marple mystery that Agatha Christie wrote — though not the last Marple published.
Best Sellers: ‘The old charm is still there and a good deal of the old magic in plotting, too.’
Times Literary Supplement: ‘Miss Marple is an old lady now, knowing that a scent for evil is still, in the evening of her days, her peculiar gift.’
13. Sleeping Murder (1976)
Soon after Gwenda Reed moves into her new home, odd things start to happen. Despite her best efforts to modernise the house, she only succeeds in dredging up its past. Worse, she feels an irrational sense of terror every time she climbs the stairs…In fear, Gwenda turns to Jane Marple to exorcise her ghosts. Between them, they are to solve a ‘perfect’ crime committed many years before…
Of note: Agatha Christie wrote Sleeping Murder during World War II and had it placed in a bank vault for over thirty years.
Chicago Tribune: ‘Agatha Christie saved the best for last.’
Sunday Express: ‘A puzzle that is tortuous, surprising, and…satisfying.’
14. Miss Marple’s Final Cases (1979)
Despite the title, the stories collected here recount cases from the middle of Miss. Marple’s career. They are: ‘Sanctuary’; ‘Strange Jest’; ‘Tape-Measure Murder’; ‘The Case of the Caretaker’; ‘The Case of the Perfect Maid’; ‘Miss Marple Tells a Story’; ‘The Dressmaker’s Doll’; ‘In a Glass Darkly’; ‘Greenshaw’s Folly.’
The Republican (Springfield, Massachusetts): ‘When it all becomes clear as day, the reader can only say, “Now why didn’t I think of that?” But he never does. Mrs Christie at her best.’
Charles Osborne on
Nemesis
Miss Marple (1971)
Nemesis is the last book that Agatha Christie was to write about Miss Marple. Two more titles were to be published posthumously, but one, Sleeping Murder (1976), had been written during the Second World War and deliberately put aside for posthumous publication, while the other, Miss Marple’s Final Cases, contains stories also written earlier. Nemesis is not exactly a sequel to the 1965 Miss Marple novel, A Caribbean Mystery, but it does, in a way, grow out of the earlier book and out of Jane Marple’s collaboration with the elderly, wealthy Jason Rafiel in the West Indies.
At the beginning of Nemesis, Miss Marple comes across Mr Rafiel’s name in the Deaths column of The Times. A week or so later, the late gentleman’s solicitors write to her with an offer of a legacy of £20,000 from Mr Rafiel on condition that she investigate a certain crime. Miss Marple is given no more detail than this, but some days later she is invited to join a tour of Famous Houses and Gardens of Great Britain, at the expense of the late Mr Rafiel. The hunt is on, and another of Agatha Christie’s ‘crime in the past’ novels is off to a highly promising start.
Miss Marple mentions more than once that it is a year, or perhaps even two, since the Caribbean adventure during which she had met Mr Rafiel. However, A Caribbean Mystery was published in 1964, a good seven years before Nemesis. The reader should perhaps consider the events of Nemesis as occurring in 1968: either that or, as happens with the old,