“As an artist I have knocked about among all sorts and conditions of people. I know life as darling Miss Marple here cannot possibly know it.”

I recently finished reading Agatha Christie’s The Tuesday Night Club and it is surprisingly sharp.

A group of friends (a writer, an artist, a clergyman, a lawyer and a police commissioner) is having a late-night discussion, hosted by the old aunt of one of the members. One of them theorizes that some crimes stay unsolved because policemen are all very similar in character which leaves them with blind spots. Following their theory, the current group should do much better at solving crimes due to their diversity.

To test the theory, the commissioner describes a crime that stayed unsolved for quite some time until the answer fell into the police’s lap. All the members of the audience are stumped by the puzzle until Miss Marple, the old aunt that has been dismissed and relegated to her knitting since the beginning, tells everyone that the answer is obvious and proceeds to solve the murder as if it were nothing.

“You have forgotten me, dear,” said Miss Marple, smiling brightly.
Joyce was slightly taken aback, but she concealed the fact quickly.
“That would be lovely, Miss Marple,” she said. “I didn’t think you would care to play.”

The writing style is sharp, people exchange banter and puns at each other, and full of dry humor, most characters are made fun of at one point or another but the writer puts no emphasis on it, letting the reader pick it up by themselves.

From a purely mechanical perspective, it is a shame that the solution to the problem relies on words and expressions from Anglo-Saxon English that are getting less and less common. Making it impossible for most modern readers to have a fair chance at solving the puzzle. However, the value of the story is not in the clever puzzle.

The key point of the story is that Miss Marple does not solve the crime because she is a genius of deduction but rather because she is a woman and old and spent her life in her small village (making her familiar with both cooking vocabulary and the way people behave). Those are explicitly why the rest of the company, including the only other woman present, dismissed her: when the group thinks of itself as diverse, they don’t even realize that by dismissing the old lady they are displaying a blind spot of their own.

This message feels very modern, despite having been written in 1927, because by their very nature we are still, almost a hundred years later, blind to most of our blind spots…

“Well, Aunt Jane, this is one up to you. I can’t think how on earth you managed to hit upon the truth. I should never have thought of the little maid in the kitchen being connected with the case.”
“No, dear,” said Miss Marple, “but you don’t know as much of life as I do."