Absent in the Spring

This was so disturbing and maddening - but, in a good way?

No, I don't think I can say 'in a good way' about any of this book. Much of the reading was painful.
Being stranded in a rest house in the middle of the desert (fully provisioned and staffed with at least a few) may not sound so painful, but Joan was stranded without anything to read beyond the first day. That circumstance alone chilled me to the core.

Her self-reflection - even though I am not her, and I believe I am nothing like her - was intensely painful, for several reasons. One being her absolute obtuseness, another being her endless judgments, and still another being - good God, is she ever going to see things for what they are??

An then, of course, there is the question - show more but - am I, in certain ways, just like her?

Not a fun book to read. But really, a very good one. show less

First published at Booking in Heels.

Alrighty then. So, Joan Scudamore is on her way back from visiting her daughter in Baghdad when she gets stuck in a resting house in the middle of nowhere. She is the only guest, with no books or puzzles, and nowhere to go and nothing to see. She ends up turning inside her own head, chewing over her life choices and attitudes which had previously been the topic of a mild smugness. Now she begins to realise that perhaps she hasn’t been the perfect wife and mother that she had assumed.

To begin with, she fixates on the fact that her husband had been quite relieved when she had left him to go on this trip. She can’t get the sight of him walking away from her out of her head. Then she considers the show more true role that a close female friend had played in their lives, as well as her children’s attitudes towards her as they matured. She looks at the choices she made on behalf of the whole family, and whether she was always quite so selfless as she had always assidiously made out.

This book is brutal, there’s really no other word for it. The reader has to sit idly by whilst Joan Scutamore performs a vicious character assassination on herself. It’s actually quite hard to read, in parts. Not because of the prose or the structure, but because it apparently struck a raw nerve for me.

The tone is completely different from Agatha Christie’s detective novels. It’s chattier and less formal. We’re inside Joan’s head for all but the epilogue, and parts of it are almost stream of consciousness. It honestly flies past, despite the slow build nature of the topic. Also, whilst her Poirot and Marple books tend to be quite monotone (I love them, don’t get me wrong) and steady, Absent in the Spring is nothing but emotion.

Despite the overaching Point of the book, Joan Scudamore isn’t actually unlikeable. Yes, she’s smug and a bit judgemental, but it’s in a gentle 40s housewife kind of way. She’s not unkind; she strives to be quite the opposite. It’s therefore really quite difficult to read her slow descent into self-awareness. At points I found myself making excuses for her behaviour, and wanting to have a stern word with her family for being so harsh and apathetic towards her.

I wanted to give it a five star rating, based on how it completely altered my mood for the day. Only the best written books can make you see your world in a different way, even if it’s just for a short period. However, the ending knocked it down by a star. It’s not that it’s terrible, but I think it would have been better if Absent in the Spring ended as the train pulled away. It’s probably a realistic ending, but it would have been better not to know.

And that last sentence just punched me in the heart. Jesus. Brutal, much?

In short, Absent in the Spring is a masterpiece and I don’t use that word lightly. I pulled down her Autobiography to check what Agatha Christie had said about it, which was ‘(It was) the one book that has satisfied me completely… the book that I had always wanted to write, that had been clear in my mind. It was the picture of a woman with a complete image of herself, of what she was, but about which she was completely mistaken.’ She wrote the whole thing over three days, calling in sick to the hospital dispensary where she worked to do so. Honestly, this book is incredible. It’s very honest, unsparing and brilliant. show less

"Joan felt a little gentle glow as she turned away from her image in the glass. She thought, Well, it’s nice to feel one’s been a success at one’s job. I never wanted a career, or anything of that kind. I was quite content to be a wife and mother. I married the man I loved, and he’s been a success at his job – and perhaps that’s owing to me a bit too. One can do so much by influence."

Absent in the Spring is the book that Agatha Christie describes as her favourite piece of work - not because it is her best but because it was the book she really wanted to write.

Amazingly, it is a pretty good story even though there is not a single murder in sight!

The story follows Joan Scudamore, a middle-class wife and mother who is show more returning from a visit to her daughter in Iraq and is stuck in the middle of nowhere, in a desert, because of the railway lines being flooded. Oh, the irony.

Anyway, Christie fabulously uses Joan's isolation to let her reflect on her life and ponder over her relationship with her husband and with her daughter.
The crux of the story is that Joan's perception of herself and of the people around her are as much an illusion as the mirage she experiences when out walking in the desert.

The question, however, that keeps the story quite tense is whether Joan will realise this by the end of the book.

I found myself reading this book with some apprehension as I had no idea what to expect. Of course, the biggest surprise was that I could hardly put the book down once the characters had been introduced and Joan's dilemma became clear.

"What was it Blanche had said? You’ve gone up in the world and I’ve gone down.’ No, she had qualified it afterwards – she had said, ‘You’ve stayed where you were – a St Anne’s girl who’s been a credit to the school.’" show less

Absence Makes the Heart Grow Fonder?
A review of the William Morrow Paperbacks eBook (May 20, 2025) of the Collin (UK August 1944) and Farrar & Reinhart (US later in 1944) hardcover originals.

And aloud, with disproportionate fervour, she exclaimed: ‘From you have I been absent in the Spring*.’ She couldn’t remember how it went on. She didn’t seem to want to. That line was enough in itself.

I was again pleasantly impressed by Absent in the Spring which, like the 2 other Mary Westmacotts that I've read to date, was not at all a "romance drama" as I had previously been led to believe. It tells the story of a middle-aged woman who is stranded for several days at an outpost in a middle-eastern desert when flooding causes a train delay. show more She had been visiting her sick daughter in Baghdad and was returning home to England and her husband.

Joan Scudamore has led a very self-satisfied existence while lording over her husband and three children. In response they have turned inwards and disguised their innermost lives and thoughts from her. In the case of the children it has meant they have moved far away from home and have little connection to their mother, although still loving their father dearly.

The solitary time that is forced upon Joan causes her to reflect on her life and we see flashbacks of significant past events in the family as they pass through her mind. She begins to have an inkling of how she has distanced herself from her husband and resolves to repair that when she is finally able to complete her journey back home. But will she have the will to follow through with that plan?

This novel Absent in the Spring counts against my Complete Agatha Christie binge read goal, so I now have 13 novels (including 3 remaining Westmacotts), 3 short story collections, 10.5 full-length theatrical plays, 5 shorter radio plays) and 1 autobiography left to go.

Footnote
* The title of the novel is taken from the opening line in Shakespeare's Sonnet 98 which you can read here.

Trivia and Links
Absent in the Spring was the 3rd of 6 non-crime novels published by Agatha Christie under the pseudonym of Mary Westmacott. Her regular publisher Collins was not happy with the Westmacotts, although they did publish the first 3 of them. After Collins rejected the 4th book The Rose and the Yew Tree (1948) Christie took it to the publisher William Heinemann Ltd. who accepted it and then published the final 3 Westmacotts.

The identity of Agatha Christie as the actual author had been kept a secret up until 1949 when it was released in a gossip column in the Sunday Times. A cynic might suspect 🤔 that the truth was leaked by the publisher in order to increase sales. Even after the leak, the 5th and 6th books were still published under the Westmacott pseudonym.

Read the further background on the Mary Westmacott novels at the official Agatha Christie website here.

As of March 31, 2026, there is a new 6-episode podcast about the Westmacott novels called Westmapod: Agatha Christie's Secret Identity. Listen at Spotify here where the Absent in the Spring episode is on May 12, 2026.
The promo reads: "Who is Mary Westmacott?
This is an Agatha Christie podcast with a twist - because she wrote the books in secret!
Join Mark Aldridge and Gray Robert Brown from The Swinging Christies, for this book club-style, limited-series discussion podcast about these six fascinating books.
Maybe if we unlock the secrets of Mary Westmacott, we will better understand the Queen of Crime herself, Agatha Christie…"

Addendum
This is a reckoning of my remaining Agatha Christie TBR novels. The novels read are stroked through and those yet to be read are counted on the right hand side of the listing. The reckoning does not include the 3 posthumous novelizations of Agatha Christie stage plays made by Australian writer Charles Osborne, although I was initially counting them as I worked through the binge.
Note: The stroke-throughs cannot be seen on all platforms (mobile phones for instance), but the number count on the right hand side of the remaining titles should be clear enough.
1. The Mysterious Affair at Styles
2. The Secret Adversary
3. The Murder on the Links
4. The Man in the Brown Suit
5. The Secret of Chimneys
6. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
7. The Big Four
8. The Mystery of the Blue Train
9. The Seven Dials Mystery
10. The Murder at the Vicarage
11. The Sittaford Mystery
12. Peril at End House
13. Lord Edgware Dies
14. Murder on the Orient Express
15. Why Didn't They Ask Evans? 1
16. Three Act Tragedy
17. Death in the Clouds
18. The A.B.C. Murders
19. Murder in Mesopotamia
20. Cards on the Table
21. Dumb Witness
22. Death on the Nile
23. Appointment with Death
24. Hercule Poirot's Christmas
25. Murder Is Easy 2
26. And Then There Were None 3
27. Sad Cypress
28. One, Two, Buckle My Shoe
29. Evil Under the Sun
30. N or M?
31. The Body in the Library
32. Five Little Pigs
33. The Moving Finger
34. Towards Zero
35. Death Comes as the End
36. Sparkling Cyanide 4
37. The Hollow
38. Taken at the Flood
39. Crooked House
40. A Murder Is Announced
41. They Came to Baghdad 5
42. Mrs McGinty's Dead
43. They Do It with Mirrors
44. After the Funeral
45. A Pocket Full of Rye
46. Destination Unknown 6
47. Hickory Dickory Dock
48. Dead Man's Folly
49. 4.50 from Paddington
50. Ordeal by Innocence 7
51. Cat Among the Pigeons
52. The Pale Horse 8
53. The Mirror Crack'd from Side to Side
54. The Clocks
55. A Caribbean Mystery
56. At Bertram's Hotel
57. Third Girl
58. Endless Night
59. By the Pricking of My Thumbs
60. Hallowe'en Party
61. Passenger to Frankfurt 9
62. Nemesis
63. Elephants Can Remember
64. Postern of Fate
65. Curtain 10
66. Sleeping Murder

As Mary Westmacott
66. Giant's Bread 11
67. Unfinished Portrait 12
68. Absent in the Spring
69. The Rose and the Yew Tree
70. A Daughter's a Daughter
71. The Burden 13 show less

This novel really hit the spot for me. It follows the thoughts of a middle-aged woman as she experiences something of a crisis resulting from an unplanned period of solitude. I have long enjoyed Christie's mysteries, but these Westmacott books really highlight her skill at writing characters.

WoW! How astute Agatha Christie! What an amazing writer to be able to portray the character of Joan Scudamore in her self-discovery and time of analysis of the life she created for herself, her husband and children. It is a page-turning short story that follows the emotions of a woman as she is stranded and isolated unexpectedly in her travel home due to the flooding of railroad tracks. With books read, letters written, no other stranded travelers to share the experience and/or a conversation, time passes ever so slowly. There are large gaps of time to fill between meals, tea time, bath and bedtime - time for walks and time to think. Will she return home as the woman she was or build upon her time of self-discovery to start anew? What show more does she choose? What would you choose?

In some ways, I can imagine this novel creating quite a stir when published in 1944, and yet due to the world stage at that time, I can also imagine this novel not receiving the intended attention of the British reading audience. I can also imagine many interesting and lively discussions taking place in today's book clubs.

To view London in 1944, there is an interesting set of photographs available at this link:
https://londonist.com/london/history/london-in-1944

Don't miss reading more about the novels by Christie's daughter, Rosalind Hicks...
https://www.agathachristie.com/about-christie/family-memories/the-mary-westmacot...

I am looking forward to reading the next romance titled, "The Rose and the Yew Tree." show less

While I have read all of Agatha Christie's novels and short stories, this might be the first time I have read anything written under the nom de plume of Mary Westmacott.

Giant's Bread (1930)
Unfinished Portrait (1934)
Absent in the Spring (1944)
The Rose and the Yew Tree (1948)
A Daughter's a Daughter (1952)
The Burden (1956)

This novel is not crime fiction and you can't help wondering how autobiographical it is.

Joan Scudamore is travelling back from Iraq to England and misses her train to Stamboul to connect with the Orient Express. She reads the books she has brought with her far too quickly and in the days that ensue has nothing to do. She looks back over her life as a wife and a mother and sees events through different eyes. Joan show more begins to suspect that others have not always seen her as she sees herself and resolves to behave differently once she gets home.

But will that happen?

A very readable and interesting book. show less