At Bertram's Hotel

I’ve been working my way through Christie’s Miss Marple mysteries and this is the first one to be an utter disappointment. It was only through sheer stubbornness that I even finished it!

Miss Marple’s nephew pays for her to spend a couple weeks at the titular hotel in London. The place has been kept in the Edwardian style and she wanted to stay there to reminisce about days long gone. However, there’s something shady about the hotel. Or, at least you assume so since this is an Agatha Christie novel, but you wouldn’t know it otherwise. A series of characters comes and goes from the place: a brash and somewhat sinister race car driver, a young woman and her guardians, a clergyman. There's an out of left field scene at the police show more station where readers are told about a series of high profile robberies being investigated (gee, I wonder if it's related to the hotel?) But it's just a series of conversations - the murder doesn’t even occur until more than 2/3 of the way through the book! To make matters worse, Miss Marple doesn’t “investigate” – a police detective solves the crime, with only one observation from her.

Perhaps the worst thing that can be said about a mystery book can be said about this one: it was boring. Had this been the first novel of Christie’s that I read, I probably would not have read any more. Unless you are a die-hard completist – skip this one. show less

'At Bertram's Hotel' was a fascinating Jane Marple mystery. For me, this ranks as one of Agatha Christie's best books.

I've been impressed with how well-written the later Jane Marple books are. I love sharing Jane's thoughts on getting oldand dealing with a rapidly changing world. I also enjoy Jane's insights into how the people around her are adapting to the changing mores of post-war England.

In this book, Jane's nephew has booked her for a two-week stay at Berram's hotel in London, a place she has happy memories of from when she stayed there as a girl, many decades earlier, before the Second World War took its toll on London.

Jane is surprised to find that Bertram's has been restored to its former, quietly expensive, respectability. show more It's as if the hotel has rolled back time and brought its Edwardian ghost back to life.

This, of course, troubles Jane. It is too good to be true, therefore, it is not true. What then is the truth?

I loved how Jane's observations on the pull of nostalgia and the impossibility of recapturing the past not only gave insights into how things look as we grow older, but also enabled Jane to see Bertram's Hotel differently than everyone else. She knows that something isn't right. Figuring out what that something is was the fun part.

I also liked that, while Jane was instrumental in solving the mystery, the heavy lifting was done by a very competent police Inspector who was smart enough to use Jane as his eyes and ears.

The mystery was clever. Although there is a killing, this is much more complicated than a murder mystery. This is a story that touches on the restlessness of the age and the emergence, post-war, of organised criminals carrying out well-planned raids on banks and trains.

The people in the book were engaging and credible. Many of them, like the old Cannon who causes so much havoc when he becomes confused about which day he is supposed to catch a plane on, are the kind of solid upper-middle-class people that have always populated Christie's books and been a part of Jane Marple's life. There are also younger people, still from the same class in some cases, but with very different attitudes and expectations. Finding them all together is whatmakes Bertram's hotel such an interesting puzzle for Jane.

This was a satisfying read: engaging, well-written, plausible but still surprising.

I listened to the audiobook version of 'At Bertram's Hotel' narrated by Stephanie Cole. I thought she was the perfect choice for narrator. Click on the YouTube link below to hear a sample of her work.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nS_oxXq7fpo show less

I grew up with Agatha Christie the way some people grew up with the Bible; she was a constant presence in our house. Being a contrary child, that means I'd read everything except Christie. Mild guilt about this while I was in my 20's had me picking up the Miss Marple short stories (minimal commitment, you see).

I gotta say, while I could understand the attraction, I didn't understand the devotion. Miss Marple was smart and the mysteries were great, but the abuse of village parallels was too much. Towards the end, I was just yelling "just say what you mean you old bat!"

Which is why it's now very many years later and, with few exceptions, I still haven't read most of Christie's work, even though I've been slowly accumulating them. When show more my current booklikes-opoly square required a book set between 1945 and 1965, At Bertram's Hotel was just about the only book I had that fit the bill.

So, here I am, finally reading my first full-length Miss Marple. I'm happy to report only one village parallel! And Miss Marple does more than just sit on a bench and knit; she's actively eavesdropping and inventing mishaps to get closer to people who are up to no good. She felt like an active participant in the mystery, even if she wasn't really sleuthing and had no idea about what exactly was going on until the end.

But the book was generally a bit odd. At 192 pages I should have had it read in a few hours; instead I kept falling asleep every time I picked it up so that it took me 3 days instead. It wasn't boring; Christie is a master at pulling you into whatever setting she's cooked up and I quite enjoyed Bertram's Hotel, but the momentum was very slow to build and ultimately, what should have been a tidal wave of a story was more of a small surge: I felt the pull, but nothing so strong as to suck me in completely.

I also got the impression that Christie was rather fed up with Miss Marple when she wrote this, or maybe just feeling wistful herself about the way the world seemed to be changing rapidly around her. I kept imagining Christie as Miss Marple; longing for a time when England, and by extension, her mysteries, were more elegant, well-mannered, and gracious. Even though there would be at least 10 more books after this one, At Bertram's Hotel feels like a nostalgic look back by an author who's feeling her age.

So, not her best, but I'm betting it's nowhere near her worst; definitely more likeable than reading the Marple short stories back-to-back. show less

‘’The children of Lucifer are often beautiful.’’

Hotels are fascinating places. Well, they can be quite a nightmare if you’re careless while booking or if the residents are a bunch of barbarians (which is often the case…) but under normal circumstances, hotels hide hundreds of secrets within their rooms. And the guests just have to mingle with each other. And who knows where all this mingling will lead? In the societies of the past, it would lead to certain, shall we say, questionable situations. And murder. This is the world of Bertram’s Hotel.

Our beloved Miss Marple returns to the hotel of her youth to find that very little has remained the same. The world is supposedly progressing but sometimes, this progress is quite show more dubious. Agatha Christie creates a tangled web of doppelgangers, brave women who love adventure, despairing heiresses, playboys, broken relationships and, obviously, deadly secrets in what I consider to be one of Queen Agatha’s finest moments.

The 2007 ITV adaptation, starring the inimitable Geraldine McEwan is exceptional. Quite different from the original material but beautiful nonetheless. Not to mention that Ed Stoppard plays Ladislaus Malinowski and call me shallow, but hey…

‘’I learned (what I suppose I really knew already) that one can never go back, that one should not ever try to go back - that the essence of life is going forward. Life is really a One Way Street, isn’t it?’’

My reviews can also be found on https://theopinionatedreaderblog.wordpress.com/ show less

I was very disappointed in this one. Miss Marple is barely present (though observant--and yes, snoopy--as ever), and the context of the robbery ring and classic hotel is bizarrely and unnecessarily complicated. Why on earth did the robbers need to have a doppelganger of a hotel guest present at every robbery? Why involve the hotel at all? The actual murder and its solution seems sort of an afterthought although the predisposing circumstances were threaded throughout the book. Clearly a product of Dame Agatha's declining years.

Kind of strange. Not a typical Marple vibe. Miss Marple goes on a vacation in London and stays at a retro Edwardian hotel, that is almost like Disneyland in it's calculated quaintness. Of course, now that Miss Marple is there, stuff starts to happen. Caution with regard to hanging on to the past, and having a distrust of the comfort of nostalgia are principal themes, and these are the most interesting aspects of the novel for me. The first half of the novel spends a great deal of time with the residents of the hotel, as in the style of the 1932 movie "Grand Hotel" or Alex Hailey’s "Hotel" which was published the same year as this novel. Some elements do pan out in the second half, which is the actual crime part of the novel, but not show more as much as one would think. Miss Marple starts out as a strong presence in the first half, but then drifts into her supporting role as she often does in her respective novels.
The end is almost pulpish. There’s a Moriarty type criminal mastermind. Surprisingly big setup for a Marple novel, but there it is. Miss Marple's growing unease as a guest in the hotel adds an effectively unsetttling atmosphere to the proceedings.
At the middle section things get a bit boggy with all that’s going on, but it concludes in an interesting fashion. Ms Christie is prone to some heavy handed religious moralizing at the end, which seems a little preposterous in this almost Alistair MacLean flavored tale. She worries a great deal about the virtues of young ladies in 1965.
Worth a read for it's offbeat energy. show less

If you have read any of my reviews over the past four months or so you will know that as far as I'm concerned, Agatha Christie could do very little wrong when writing about Miss Marple. When I reach the end of the series I will likely shed a tear.

As is frequently the case, Miss Marple herself is not the star here in her adventure at Bertram's Hotel. Some readers seem not to like this; I think AC was a genius for managing to avoid a situation where she had to maneuver an elderly lady into the "primary investigator" role, over and over and over again. I love Miss Marple as though she were my own grandmother, but 10 (plus 2 to go) books from her necessarily limited perspective might have been a few too many.

I also like to think there's a show more message here about elderly spinsters, that message being: never count them out. show less