Nemesis - Agatha Christie [107]
Critics tend to be severe with the later works of Agatha Christie, and it has to be admitted that, now in her eighties, Dame Agatha is more careless than ever. Improbabilities are not explained, certain things do not quite add up, and it is as well, as far as Nemesis is concerned, not to worry unduly about how X knew that Y was investigating a death and would be at a certain place at a certain time, or why a somewhat anarchistic young man in his teens should join a tour of largely middle-aged people on a tour of historic homes and gardens.
Nevertheless, Nemesis is a highly enjoyable mystery novel, especially if you have recently read A Caribbean Mystery, two characters from which reappear briefly. Agatha Christie’s observation is as sharp as Miss Marple’s has always been, though both ladies are now grown somewhat frail. It is interesting, incidentally, to contrast the Old Manor House and its one elderly servant with Styles Court of The Mysterious Affair at Styles fifty years earlier, buzzing with servants. The decline of the upper-middleclass in England had occurred during those fifty years.
Miss Marple finds her thoughts wandering to the witches in Macbeth, and she imagines to herself how she would produce their scenes. This is not the first time Agatha Christie has addressed herself to this problem: there was a character who had appeared in The Pale Horse ten years earlier with precisely the same production ideas.
‘I have never read books on criminology as a subject or really been interested in such a thing,’ Miss Marple notes. ‘No, it has just happened that I have found myself in the vicinity of murder rather more often than would seem normal.’ In Nemesis, she confronts not only the challenge of a murder in the past which has first to be identified before it can be solved, but also a lesbian relationship which, as far as one knows, is not something Miss Marple has previously known about at first hand. She copes, with tact, sympathy and determination. The reader is almost surprised that she does not quote De La Mare’s ‘Everything human we comprehend’, for she does indulge in rather more than her usual amount of quotation, from Long-fellow’s ‘ships that pass in the night’ through T. S. Eliot’s ‘moment of the rose’ to the Bible’s ‘Let Justice roll down like waters’.
Mr Rafiel’s interest in having the crime solved becomes understandable quite early in the narrative. It is not only murder which is involved but rape; though as one of Miss Marple’s companions, a criminologist and adviser to the Home Office, remarks: ‘Girls, you must remember, are far more ready to be raped nowadays than they used to be. Their mothers insist, very often, that they should call it rape.’ An interesting and, no doubt, to feminists an infuriating point of view.
Nemesis is by no means one of the best Jane Marple mysteries, but it is enjoyable, unusual, and as easy to read as the most successful of them.
The first episode of a TV adaptation in two parts was transmitted by BBC TV on 8 February 1987, with Joan Hickson as Miss Marple.
About Charles Osborne
This essay was adapted from Charles Osborne’s The Life and Crimes of Agatha Christie: A Biographical Companion to the Works of Agatha Christie (1982, rev. 1999). Mr. Osborne was born in Brisbane in 1927. He is known internationally as an authority on opera, and has written a number of books on musical and literary subjects, among them The Complete Operas of Verdi (1969); Wagner and His World (1977); and W.H. Auden: The Life of a Poet (1980). An addict of crime fiction and the world’s leading authority on Agatha Christie, Charles Osborne adapted the Christie plays Black Coffee (Poirot); Spider’s Web; and The Unexpected Guest into novels. He lives in London.
About Agatha Christie
Agatha Christie is known throughout the world as the Queen of Crime. Her books have sold over a billion copies in English and another billion in 100 foreign languages. She is the most widely published author of all time and in any language, outsold