What’s fascinating about the Miss Marple mysteries I
have read is that Miss Marple has always been in the background of events,
something that is entirely in keeping with what Agatha Christie is doing. Miss Marple has essentially been an analysis
of class and 4:50 from Paddington is an excellent examination of
that. The murder in this one is a woman
on a train, being seen through the window of a passing train by Mrs. Elspeth
McGillicudy. A ticket collector doesn’t
believe her and the other train finds nothing out of the order, but Mrs.
McGillicudy is a friend of Miss Jane Marple of St. Mary’s Mead. Miss Marple’s characterization here is excellent,
there is something incredibly comforting of Marple showing a total belief in
Mrs. McGillicudy’s insistence on seeing a murder when the authorities simply
take her for a dotty old woman. Women are
generally seen in this novel to be lesser, yet throughout the investigations of
the murder it’s the women who are deemed innocent, this and the future murders
of the novel are all crimes of a man’s emotion’s getting the better of
him. They are essentially murders of
desperation, the first being by strangulation while the others are
poisoning. The poison deaths are steeped
in framing women, the large and rich English family that becomes the
centerpiece of the novel has only one female member in Emma Crackenthorpe. Emma is shackled to the home and her station taking
care of her father, a position she does not become free of though the end hints
that the ordeal has changed the family for the better.
Miss Marple doesn’t actually do the investigating herself
after becoming aware of Rutherford Hall and the Crackenthorpe family, instead
sending her cook Lucy to investigate and find the body, which is eventually
found in a sarcophagus on the estate.
Once we get to this point in the narrative, Lucy becomes our point of
view character, as well as a character whose only option for upward mobility in
society is through marriage, something that Miss Marple subtly hints throughout
the novel is something that will happen.
Lucy is also responsible for much of the investigation, her lower class
allowing a station that would go unnoticed and to make easy friends with the members
of the household and to uncover the intricate secrets of the house. There is this constant sense of danger as
Lucy is in the thick of it, yet there is this added smokescreen of her
potential to be the murderer herself due to having access to the food that
contains some of the poison, and later a trusted servant (though one of a
higher class) Dr. Quimper and his pharmacist are suspected due to a successful poisoning. The rest of the Crackenthorpe family all have
the motive to kill, the woman is revealed to have connections to the estate and
a potential claim on Luther Crackenthorpe’s fortune (at least in part) through
his last will and testament. The rest of
the family all have their own eccentricities setting them apart from the
expectations of their class, from married but childless Alfred, to artist and gambler
Alfred, to Bryan Eastley, the widow and father of Luther’s grandson
Alexander. This makes for a great list
of potential subjects that Christie weaves in and out shifting into whodunnit territory
once the body is actually found, but never losing focus of the class aspect.
Overall, while 4:50 from Paddington as a title
is a bit unnecessary, it’s just the train Mrs. McGillicudy was on that serves
as the inciting incident, this is actually one of Christie’s very best mysteries. It’s a small treatise on the expectations of
class that are clearly subverted and shifted through the multiple murders and
deaths plus a brilliant reveal for the murderer. Miss Marple being a background player only enhances
what makes the novel work. 9/10.
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