Review: At Bertram's Hotel by Agatha Christie

# 48: At Bertram's Hotel by Agatha Christie:

His eye was caught by a movie theater sign: Walls of Jericho. It seemed an eminently suitable title. It would be interesting to see if Biblical accuracy had been preserved.

He bought himself a seat and stumbled into the darkness. He enjoyed the film, though it seemed to him to have no relationship to the Biblical story whatsoever. Even Joshua seemed to have been left out. The walls of Jericho seemed to be a symbolical way of referring to a certain lady's marriage vows. When they had tumbled down several times, the beautiful star met the dour and uncouth hero whom she had secretly loved all along and between them they proposed to build up the walls in a way that would stand the test of time better. It was not a film destined particularly to appeal to an elderly clergyman; but Canon Pennyfeather enjoyed it very much. It was not the type of film he often saw and he felt it was enlarging his knowledge of life.

Synopsis: Miss Marple begins to notice strange goings-on at Bertram's Hotel, the ultra-posh luxury throwback to a London long-past and very much missed. At the same time, a girl and her mother have the ultimate dysfunctional relationship, a string of robberies plagues the West Midlands and a member of the clergy accidentally sees a porno and goes missing.

There's also a mysterious race car.

Okay, I read this one last when I was 12, and I remember at the time thinking that it was very posh and exciting and all, but this is one that did not, sadly, stand up to a reread. It's an Agatha Christie, true, so there's a base level of quality (for me, ymmv), which consists largely in word-choice and well-written, rhythmic sentence structure, but overall, I was kind of unimpressed by the whole effort. The crimes aren't very interesting, for a start, and Miss Marple's been relegated to the background by the efforts of a PC Plod who turns out to be brilliant and only need her help to make any progress on the case whatsoever. And the resolution was sort of meh.

Overall, it was 250 pages of Dame Agatha banging on about Kids These Days, which is totally her right, but next time I'm rereading Peril at End House.