The Moving Finger by Agatha Christie Series: Miss Marple #4
Published by William Morrow on 3/17/2009 (orig. published 7/1942)
Genres: Mystery, British mystery, Cozy Mystery
Pages: 280
Format: Kindle or ebook
Source: my personal collection
Purchase: Amazon | Bookshop | Barnes & Noble | Audible | Chirp
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Also by this author: The Monogram Murders, Hercule Poirot's Christmas, The Man in the Brown Suit, Partners in Crime
A classic mystery from the Queen of Crime in which the indomitable Miss Marple exposes a small town’s shameful secrets.
Lymstock is a town with more than its share of scandalous secrets—a town where even a sudden outbreak of anonymous hate mail causes only a minor stir.
But all that changes when one of the recipients, Mrs. Symmington, commits suicide. Her final note says “I can’t go on,” but Miss Marple questions the coroner’s verdict of suicide.
Soon nobody is sure of anyone—as secrets stop being shameful and start becoming deadly.
The book
After months in hospital following a plane crash, pilot Jerry Burton has been released to finish recuperating somewhere quiet. So Jerry and his sister Joanna rent Little Furze, a manor house in the sleepy village of Lymstock. But their illusions of bucolic bliss are rudely shattered when Jerry receives a poison pen letter accusing Joanna of being not his sister but a “painted trollop” and a whore.
The siblings soon learn that there has been a rash of these letters in recent months, all accusing the recipients of sexual misconduct in lurid, vituperative language. No one knows who the sender might be, but village gossip centers around one Mrs. Cleat, a gardener’s wife.
Meanwhile, Jerry and Joanna settle into village life, making the acquaintance of most of the middle- to upper-class residents, among them timid little Miss Barton, whose house they are renting; the perceptive but somewhat unnerving vicar’s wife, Mrs. Dane Calthrop; the local solicitor (lawyer), Mr. Symmington, his wife, and their beautiful governess Elsie; Megan Hunter, Mrs. Symmington’s daughter by her first husband; the Welsh doctor, Owen Griffith, and his overly-hearty sister Aimée; and the gossipy, beauty-loving Mr. Pye.
But the speculation turns to fear and suspicion when Mrs. Symmington is found dead, an apparent suicide, with a crumpled poison pen letter on the floor beside her. The police step up the efforts to identify the letter-writer. The case takes an even more sinister turn when a maid is found dead a week later, her head bashed in. Jerry is puzzled, and deeply worried. But he can’t seem to make sense of it. It takes Miss Marple to make sense of it all, and to arrange the trap that ultimately unmasks a murderer.
Agatha Christie often uses someone other than her detective as the main POV character. In this case, it’s Jerry Burton, who narrates the entire book in the first person. Miss Marple barely makes an appearance until more than halfway through the book, and when she does, it’s only on the periphery. Mrs. Dane Calthrop brings Miss Marple in as an “expert” in wickedness and evil, but Jerry and Joanna perceive her only as a kindly, rather inquisitive old lady. It’s not until the denouement that Miss Marple draws all the threads together for them, laying out exactly what happened.
I generally enjoy Agatha Christie, and I love Miss Marple, but this is not one of my favorite of her books. I don’t really mind spending the whole book seeing through Jerry Burton’s eyes; he’s a likeable man on the whole. But his attitudes reflect those of his time and class, as do the attitudes and comments of other characters. And Jerry is somewhat obtuse when it comes to reading emotions—his own as well as those of people around him. This underplays both his own and Joanna’s romantic relationships with other characters. At any rate, I generally prefer the third-person Miss Marple mysteries, particularly the ones in which Miss Marple plays a larger role.
Challenges: COYER 2025: Out to Lunch
The 1985 TV adaptation
I rarely say this, but in this case, I like the movie—or rather, the 1985 BBC TV adaptation—much better than the book. In fact, that 1985 adaptation, starring Joan Hickson, is one of my comfort movies. I watched it only a few weeks ago, so it was quite fresh in my mind as I reread the book.
Why do I prefer the movie? I’ll start with the obvious: Joan Hickson is, to my mind, the definitive Miss Marple. A number of very good actors have played the role over the years, but Hickson’s performance as absolutely perfect. And the 1980s BBC adaptations in which she starred are all fairly true to the original plots and the spirit of the novels, even if they tweak the details here and there. (Later adaptations have sometimes played fast and loose with the plots, even altering the identity of the murderer or adding Miss Marple to mysteries which did not originally include her at all. This infuriates me.)
In this case, the screenwriters and director made some minor changes that really enhance this particular mystery. They did not alter the murder plot itself, in terms of who, what, when, why, and how; all of that is as Christie intended. But they streamlined the cast; for instance, they combined the maid from Little Furze, who leaves due to a poison pen letter, with the murdered Symmington maid, making them the same person. This tightens the plot and raises the stakes; the murdered maid is someone we have seen onscreen and know something about. And while Jerry and Joanna remain the main characters, Miss Marple appears much earlier on and plays a significantly bigger role in the investigation as well as the overall story; she becomes (as she deserves), the third main character of the TV adaptation. Both Jerry and Joanna’s romances are highlighted a bit more in the TV adaptation, as well, which probably accounts for some of my fondness for the show.
The screenwriters made several of the other characters more sympathetic and likeable than they are in the book, particularly Aimée Griffith, here renamed Eryl (a much better name for a Welsh woman!) Unlike the original, Eryl is not at all hearty or overbearing, but approachable, even somewhat lonely. They also toned down the sexism, classism, and casual stereotyping found in Christie’s novel, whilst still acknowledging the ways in which people of that time held those views. All in all, the adaptation displays a more modern sensibility compared to the book—which makes sense, given the over-40-year gap between the writing of the book and the adaptation. Even the setting of the adaptation is somewhat later in history. Christie’s novel was published in 1942, but makes no reference to World War II; I can only assume it is set sometime in the five years before the war. By contrast, the adaptation is set after the war; both Jerry (now called “Squadron Leader Burton” and Joanna served in the war.
While I mean no disrespect to Dame Agatha, and I number several of her books among my all-time favorite mysteries, when it comes to The Moving Finger, I will choose the 1985 adaption over the book every time.
Reading this book contributed to these challenges:
- COYER 2025: Out to Lunch
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