Miss Marple takes a vacation ‘At Bertram’s Hotel’ (1965)

Agatha Christie combines crime syndicates with a murder mystery in “At Bertram’s Hotel” (1965) in a manner similar to her spycraft-murder combo in “The Clocks” from two years earlier. Just as Poirot is barely in that one, Miss Marple is barely in this one.

Marple on the sidelines

Even considering her penchant for solving murders from her armchair, Marple is oddly disengaged and rather cold here. She even makes a crucial mistake, as discovered by Chief Inspector Fred “Father” Davy. He uses Marple as a helper and sounding board, but Marple herself seems like she’d be fine packing up, going home, and forgetting about the oddities surrounding her in the hotel.

Christie might be saying something about aging; Marple has lost her edge. She still observes more than the average person, but Davy could have solved this one without her. This is different from the days of “The Tuesday Club Murders” (1932), where Marple is invariably the sharpest person in the room – outwardly modest, but with a twinkle in her eye that tells us she’s aware of her talent.

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Speaking of bygone days, Marple is nostalgic about the titular London hotel, which purposely retains an Edwardian flavor that appeals to older patrons. She fondly remembers staying at the hotel as a youth, but she’s also vaguely disturbed that it’s stuck in time.

The hotel’s trappings are a clue to the crime syndicate’s doings, but I don’t think this comes together as tightly as Christie might’ve hoped for. As always in her Big Crime novels, her ambition slightly outstrips her execution.

A new type of young woman

“Bertram’s” starts off slow and unwieldy as we’re introduced to a bevy of characters. The way each person will play into the mystery is unclear for a long time; indeed, the murder doesn’t happen until late in the book.

While some of these people are underdeveloped and even unnecessary to the plot, two of them pop off the page. Elvira Blake instinctively knows how to manipulate the world around her to her own ends. Christie also peppers these traits into Elvira’s friend Bridget, who isn’t quite as good at the game.

The author’s fascination and unease about this new breed of young woman in the 1960s seeps onto the pages. Consider the side thread about Elvira stealing jewelry and later returning it, pleading a mistake. It has little to do with the main plot. Christie is mulling over what a young woman can get away with by skillfully wielding her attractiveness and (pseudo-) innocence.

Along with Elvira, the other memorable character is Canon Pennyfather. He is so absentminded that he gets the date of his trip to a scholarly conference wrong. This sets in motion the core confusion of the plot Davy and his charges must navigate.

Crime might not pay off, but the novel does

“Bertram’s” spends far more pages on buildup than on payoff, but the buildup becomes gradually more intriguing, and the payoff is excellent. Christie piles on the revelations, false solutions, actual solutions and even some cat-and-mouse action fast and furious. If you pick this book up with 50 pages to go, you’ll be reading those 50 pages in one sitting.

This isn’t one of those mysteries a reader has a fair chance of solving; until the revelations come, there aren’t strong clues pointing to them. That seems to be par for the course in Christie’s more sweeping yarns, and it’s not a major complaint.

Among Christie’s crime thrillers, “Bertram’s” is way better than “The Big Four,” and slightly superior to most of the Tommy & Tuppence novels. I put it a notch below those Bundle & Battle books from the 1920s, which I find energetic and fun.

“At Bertram’s Hotel” isn’t tight enough to rank among elite Christies, and judged purely for Marple’s performance as a sleuth, it’s an odd one. But the gripping conclusion and sharp observations about the fast-changing Sixties make it worth fighting through the slow start.

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