Short Story Genre Survey, Part 5

 

Sports

Adventure

Mystery

Crime

Horror

Science Fiction

Fantasy

Western

War

I've added a category. Today, we'll be looking at a mystery that is a traditional whodunit. I realized that we also need a category for hard-boiled crime stories. Some of them do have a whodunit element, but its not a necessary component and I think you can consider traditional mysteries and noirish crime tales to be separate genres.

Anyway, as I said, we'll be looking at a traditional whodunit--this one by the Queen of Whodunits, Agatha Christie. Gee whiz, the woman was brilliant. Her mysteries are fair-play. The clues are always there for us to see. But they are so casually dropped into the story that we easily miss them.

"A Christmas Tragedy" (originally titled "The Hat and the Alibi") was published in the January 1930 issue of The Story-Teller. It's part of a series of stories in which the clever Miss Marple is at a gathering with friends. In each story, a friend tells of an experience that includes a mystery. Miss Marple, of course, inevitably figures out the mystery part of it.

This time, it's Miss Marple's turn to tell a tale. And it's a good one. She tells about a time that she realized a husband was planning to murder his wife and make it look like an accident. But she has no proof and knows the wife won't believe her.

Then the wife was murdered. But it's not an accident. It's obviously a murder. She was bashed over the head in her hotel room.

But the husband has a solid alibi. He couldn't have done it. It was, the police conclude, a burglar she caught in the room.

This doesn't sit well with Miss Marple. But she concedes that the husband does indeed have an alibi for the time his wife was murdered.

Or so it seems...

It's a story I can't summarzie any further without spoilers. The clues are there and the solution is clever and satsifying. This is the sort of puzzle that Christie did better than anyone else. I'm afraid I don't have a link to take you directly to the story this time, but its worth searching out. It's available in the anthologies The Thirteen Problems and The Complete Short Stories of Agatha Christie.