Mystery Review: The Thirteen Problems, the second Miss Marple book, was (unusually) a collection of thirteen short stories demonstrating how ideally that format fit her method of detection. It's also been published under a different title, as The Tuesday Club Murders. Here the riddles are stripped to the essentials without added red herrings and layers of misdirection. At times the answers turn on the simplest and most shameless of tricks, which a reader might not accept gently after laboring for 250 pages, but makes for a perfectly fine ending when one has only invested a portion of an hour. I can envision Christie turning a few of the stories in The Thirteen Problems into full length novels by expanding the cast of characters, creating additional possibilities, throwing in subplots and detours. But by sticking to the basics she not only saved herself a great deal of time and effort, but gave us these neat and gem-like puzzles all tidily and efficiently reconciled. The only drawback to reading all thirteen stories in one go was that it revealed how formulaic Christie could be. Miss Marple often smiles "benignly," she always recalls some "village parallel," and consistently observes that human nature is much the same everywhere. Much "twinkling" occurs. That accident aside, The Thirteen Problems was a near-perfectly enjoyable reading experience. [4★]
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