The Sittaford Mystery - Agatha Christie [1]
The Clocks
Third Girl
Hallowe’en Party
Elephants Can Remember
Poirot’s Early Cases
Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case
Miss Marple Mysteries
The Murder at the Vicarage
The Thirteen Problems
The Body in the Library
The Moving Finger
A Murder Is Announced
They Do It with Mirrors
A Pocket Full of Rye
4.50 from Paddington
The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side
A Caribbean Mystery
At Bertram’s Hotel
Nemesis
Sleeping Murder
Miss Marple’s Final Cases
Tommy & Tuppence
The Secret Adversary
Partners in Crime
N or M?
By the Pricking of My Thumbs
Postern of Fate
Published as Mary Westmacott
Giant’s Bread
Unfinished Portrait
Absent in the Spring
The Rose and the Yew Tree
A Daughter’s a Daughter
The Burden
Memoirs
An Autobiography
Come, Tell Me How You Live
Play Collections
The Mousetrap and Selected Plays
Witness for the Prosecution and Selected Plays
* novelised by Charles Osborne
E-Book Extras
Essay by Charles Osborne
Charles Osborne on The Sittaford Mystery
The Sittaford Mystery, published in Great Britain in 1931, and in America as Murder at Hazelmoor,10 was written during a few weeks in 1929, and is one of those Agatha Christie crime novels in which the murderer is unmasked not by Poirot or Miss Marple or one of the author’s other ‘regulars’, but by the heroine of the novel, who is usually a courageous and determined young woman with something of the spirit of Tuppence Beresford in her.
Anne Beddingfield in The Man in the Brown Suit (1924) is the earliest of these adventurous ladies, and Katherine Grey in The Mystery of the Blue Train (1928) is potentially one of them, although she does not develop her potentiality since she has Poirot on hand. In The Sittaford Mystery Emily Trefusis is engaged to be married to a young man who has been arrested for the murder of his uncle, Captain Trevelyan. Convinced of his innocence, she sets out to discover the identity of the murderer, and eventually succeeds with the help of the police Inspector in charge of the case. The police, in Christie novels, are not always Inspector Japp-like incompetents brought into the story merely to set off the brilliance of the private detective.
For the first time, Mrs Christie makes use of Dartmoor, virtually her native heath and the place where she wrote her very first crime novel. Normally, her settings are in less bleak and inhospitable parts of the English countryside, but in The Sittaford Mystery she takes advantage of the snow-bound moorland village, using it not simply for atmosphere but making it contribute to the plot as well. You cannot fail to be reminded of Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles, not only by the setting but also by the fact that, in both novels, a prisoner escapes from Princetown, the prison in the centre of Dartmoor.
Agatha Christie was interested in the supernatural, and indeed was to write some of her finest short stories on supernatural subjects…But The Sittaford Mystery is not necessarily a supernatural one. There are, in fact, two mysteries, and Mrs Christie juggles them superbly so that, until she is ready to tell us, we are never sure whether they are connected or even what one of them is. Who murdered Captain Trevelyan? And why have Mrs Willett and her daughter come to live in Sittaford? These would appear to be the mysteries, and presumably they are related.
The Sittaford Mystery is strongly plotted, and the solutions to its puzzles are not likely to be arrived at by deduction on the reader’s part. It is also one of Mrs Christie’s most entertaining crime novels, and her use of the Dartmoor background is masterly. But you cannot help thinking that, given the characters of those involved, the actual motive for the murder when it is revealed seems rather inadequate. Real life produces murders committed for motives which seem even more inadequate, but that is not the point. Usually the reader is convinced by Mrs Christie’s explanations, but on this occasion he may well consider it unlikely that this particular person would have committed