At Bertram's Hotel - Not one of Agatha Christie's finest

In a nutshell

A plodding whodunit which takes its own sweet time to set things up but doesn't quite deliver the punch at the end with its reveal.

Plot

Miss Marple returns to a favorite childhood spot, Bertram's hotel, to experience the nostalgia of the bygone years. The hotel's guests include Miss Marple's gregarious friend Selena Hazy, absent minded Canon Pennyfather who's making his way to a conference in Lucerne via London, hypervigilant Colonel Luscombe accompanied by his precocious ward Elvira Blake and tabloid friendly socialite Lady Bess Sedgwick who always seems to have a knack of generating headlines. While Miss Marple does take great pleasure in the comforts of the place she also quickly comes to sense that there's something sinister going on behind all that external facade.

While a motley group of characters is permeating Bertram's hotel, the city is being terrorized by the daring thefts of a criminal gang which has evaded the police by skillfully impersonating prominent people. Hot on their trail is Chief Inspector Fred Davy who has painstakingly studied the gang's modus operandi and has unearthed a vital clue in his investigation. Almost everyone whom the gang impersonates ends up being a guest at Bertram's hotel.

When another guest of the hotel, Canon Pennyfather disappears on his way to the airport and is miraculously identified at the site of a major railroad robbery, Chief Inspector Davy decides to finally make his way to Bertram's hotel and smoke out the perpetrators. Most of his inquiries are stonewalled until he meets Miss Marple who lets out two vital pieces of information:

She saw the Canon exiting his hotel room at midnight on the day he disappeared
A certain race car driver who's doing the rounds of the hotel seems to have caught the fancy of Ms. Elvira Blake

Chief Inspector Davy is intrigued by both pieces of information. A race car was reported to have been the main getaway vehicle at several of the lootings. But before a link is established between the vehicle and the thefts, Canon Pennyfather mysteriously returns with a bump on his head and Elvira Blake survives an attempt on her life. The bullets aimed at Elvira end up taking the life of Bertram's commissionaire, Michael Gorman.

It turns out that Ms. Elvira Blake is the sole heir to a wealthy estate and is all set to inherit a lot of money on her 21st birthday. It's also revealed that she's been scared for her life for quite some time.

Chief Inspector Davy deduces that the thefts and the murder are interconnected in one way or the other and invites Miss Marple for a reconstruction of the night Canon Pennyfather came back to the hotel after leaving for the airport.

The reconstruction along with Miss Marple's recollection of certain vital facts propels Chief Inspector Davy to apprehend the guilty parties.

What didn't work for me?

In a peculiar twist, although Bertram's Hotel is touted as a Miss Marple mystery, she's not a central character in the plot with Chief Inspector Davy taking the lead role in the investigation
All throughout the novel, Miss Marple just seems to be there at the right place at the right time picking up on all of the suspicious interactions. Instead of deductive reasoning its happenstance which unveils critical clues watering down the detection aspects that we come to expect from an Agatha Christie mystery
If you are a plundering ring with significant resources why would you repeatedly commit offences that would tie you to one single location - Bertram's Hotel?

Conclusion

Bertram's Hotel could have been the start of Agatha Christie's decline considering the fact that many of her works after this didn't generate the same level of excitement as those in her prime. I am all for slow burn thrillers (like Towards Zero) which take their time to move all the pieces into the right places but felt that Bertram Hotel's plot meanders quite a bit and never quite picks up the tempo to leave a mark. What did you feel when you read Bertram's Hotel? Let me know your thoughts.

Rated: Not quite worth your time

Until next time,

Your Agatha Christie fan

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