Why a Booktrail?
1900s: A crime thriller club of sorts where Miss Marple is tasked with solving recent crimes
The Thirteen Problems (Miss Marple)
What you need to know before your trail
Each chapter a new story and a new mystery to solve…
At the Tuesday Night Club, locals gather round at Miss Marple’s house. Her nephew is there as is the local clergyman Dr Pender. The topic of conversation? Each person has a story to tell, a mystery which the other guests have to discuss, guess and solve. While they chat, Miss Marple sits and knits away “something white and soft and fleecy”. She listens and all you can hear from her is the click clack of her needles…until she speaks and goes on to solve each mystery in turn, giving a full and detailed explanation of what must have happened. They say it’s always the quiet ones you have to look out for!
More stories follow – this time at Colonel and Mrs Bantry’s house. As each story gets more and more elaborate, Miss Marple has some tough calls to make.
Travel Guide
St Mary Mead is the fictional village but very real setting for the thirteen problems Agatha Christie and her friends discuss around dinner. Now this is a dinner party with a difference. A book club and supper club in one but where the mysteries and murders are not from the pages of a novel but from the lives of the people of St Mary Mead.
The setting of Miss Marple’s house is a perfect setting for a good murder mystery. With Miss Marple knitting in the corner, seemingly not involved in the rest of the group, it’s her whose cheeks grow pinker with excitement and offers opinions as she counts the stitches in her knitting.
When someone tells her that she can’t possibly know life as she does, Miss Marple replies with wit and grace – ‘I don’t know about that dear’ – a cosy crime put down from the little old lady with white hair who must not be underestimated!
“Very painful and distressing things happen in villages sometimes”
Yes they do – thirteen things are gathered here in one sitting – and your impression of Miss Marple, her crime fighting friends and a cosy dinner party in the small village of St Mary Mead may never be the same again.
St Mary Mead
Although fictional it is said to be situated some 25 miles from London and close to the fictional towns of Much Benham and Market Basing according to the novels. In the television adaptation of the stories, the village of Nether Wallop (it’s as if Agatha Christie named it herself) was used for filming.
Booktrailer Review
Susan:
Picked this up from a charity shop and devoured it in a day. Why did this have such an impression? I guess it’s my idea of a great dinner party – sitting around discussing crime mysteries under the watchful eye of Miss Marple. Knitting and solving crimes seems just the perfect and understated way to be. It reminded me a bit of Columbo how he seems so scruffy and insignificant with his bumbling ways but then all the time he’s thinking and working things out and he pulls the rug out from under you. This stories gave me the feeling that I was right at the dinner parties and discussing things with everyone and I had a very pleasant time indeed dear.
Where Next?
