Agatha Christie's short story collection The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding (1960) reposed on last month's festive to-be-read pile, but didn't get around to it and moved to the 2024 pile – together with the British Library Crime Classics Christmas-themed anthologies. There is, however, one short story from The Adventures of the Christmas Pudding I wanted to get to before the end of this year. A short story I've not read before!
The story begins with the author Raymond West ("his books dealt bleakly with the sordid side of life") taking the well-known literary critic, Horace Bindler, to see a place known as Greenshaw's Folly. Bindler's hobby is collecting photographs of architectural monstrosities and Greenshaw's Folly certainly fits the bill. A sprawling, rambling miss-mash of styles erected in the 1800s costing the original Greenshaw a small fortune and "either went bankrupt or the next thing to it" ("hence the name, Greenshaw's Folly"), but a Greenshaw still lives there. The old, very eccentric Miss Katherine Greenshaw. While looking around and snapping pictures, Miss Greenshaw asks West and Bindler to witness her new will. A new will favoring her housekeeper, Mrs. Cresswell. She also tells them in passing she wishes to see her grandfather's old diaries published and West recommends someone to work on the diaries, Louisa Oxley.
So every day, Louisa reports to Raymond West and his aunt, Miss Jane Marple, what's happening at Greenshaw's Folly ("tomorrow another instalment of this thrilling serial"). Miss Marple is very puzzled about one of Miss Greenshaw's remarks, "if you want to know the time, ask a policeman," drawing a comparison to a certain Mr. Naysmith – who kept bees and liked to fool people ("...sometimes it led to trouble"). But everyone at the table "decided that dear Aunt Jane was perhaps getting a little bit disconnected in her old age," until the murder happened.
Louisa Oxley is working in the library, on the first floor, she hears a scream from the garden and sees Miss Greenshaw staggering towards the house with the shaft of an arrow sticking out of her breast. She can't go down to help, because someone had locked her in. Mrs. Cresswell is locked inside an adjacent room. So they have to wait for the police to arrive to begin their hunt for the murderer, but the three suspects, nephew, gardener and housekeeper, who have a motive also possess perfectly acceptable alibis. So it's up to Miss Marple to play ("...murder, dear Raymond, isn't a game") armchair detective and explain who killed Miss Greenshaw. But is it any good?
"Greenshaw's Folly" has been called "a genuine tale of pure mystery" and I agree for the most part, but it was written after Christie had produced her last great detective novel (After the Funeral, 1954) and right before the steady decline in quality. In this short story, you can see some of Christie's strengths has already began to wane as she recycled and patched together a ton of old ideas and tricks. However, the Agatha Christie of the 1930s and '40s was waning, en route to the Swinging Sixties, but not entirely gone as she certainly didn't phone it in. Christie's treatment of those old ideas and tricks felt fresh and even somewhat original in how they were presented and put to excellent use. It perhaps needed to be slightly longer to be fully effective, but, in every other regard, a good, solidly-plotted detective story from Christie's last strong period.
A note for the curious: "Greenshaw's Folly" is listed in Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders (1991), but it's not an impossible crime story. It's a classic alibi-breaker closer to Christopher Bush than John Dickson Carr.
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