"Nemesis" by Agatha Christie

Sydney M. Williams

Burrowing into Books

“Nemesis” by Agatha Christie

November 20, 2019

“I would only say that certain people remind me of other certain people I have known;

and that therefore I can presuppose a certain likeness between the way they would act.”

                                                                                                            Jane Marple speaking

                                                                                                            Nemesis, 1971

                                                                                                            Agatha Christie (1890-1976)

Nemesis: noun meaning an inescapable agent of someone’s or something’s downfall.

Agatha Christie did something right. The Guinness World Records have her as the best-selling novelist of all time – two billion copies! In the rankings of most published works, her novels rank third, behind the Bible and the works of Shakespeare. She has been translated into 103 languages. Her best-selling book, And Then There Were None, has sold 100 million copies. Her stage play “The Mousetrap” is London’s West End’s longest running play, having opened November 25, 1952 and still going strong. It behooves any reader to periodically remind themselves why this woman’s stories are so popular. To do so, all one must do is visit your local bookstore or library and pick up a copy. Reading one, the answer becomes obvious.

Nemesis is the thirteenth novel (and the last) to star the intuitive (“’Yes,’ said Miss Marple, ‘I can imagine it. I’ve always been able to imagine things.’”), but physically frail Jane Marple (Her left knee was always a little uncertain). The story was originally published in 1971. The first of Miss Christie’s mystery novels to include Jane. Marple was The Murder at the Vicarage in 1930. This one tells of a crime committed years ago, a murder for which the wrong person was accused and went to jail.

In a previous novel, A Caribbean Mystery, Miss Marple had met Jason Rafiel, a wealthy, but somewhat shadowy financier. Together, they had solved a mystery. Rafiel, recognizing her cleverness and genius for justice, had given her the moniker Nemesis, after she had uncovered the murderer. In this novel, Jane Marple receives a communication from the now deceased Mr. Rafiel asking her to investigate a crime, but without telling her what the crime was or who was involved. If successful, she will receive a reward of £20,000. Her only instructions are to attend a week-long garden tour, tickets for which have been paid by the estate of Jason Rafiel.

Miss Marple accepts the challenge and, as expected and after surviving a harrowing ordeal involving a third murder, she solves the original, and subsequent, crimes, so pockets the £20,000. Agatha Christie’s genius lies in providing the reader clues, which are revealed to less astute readers like me at the conclusion.

Unlike crime writers today who rely on shock and violence, Agatha Christie challenges the reader to think through the mystery, to understand the psychology of those involved. Murder in her novels, one might argue, is thus sanitized and therefore less realistic. It is the solution that makes her mysteries compelling. The reader is left with an ‘Aha!’ moment – so that is how it happened! Her suspenseful stories are demanding of the reader, as true today as when they were written fifty to a hundred years ago. On snowy, cold winter nights, one could do worse than curl up before a fire with hot cocoa and an Agatha Christie mystery.