A relatively late "Miss Marple" mystery. Miss Marple is vacationing at the old, exclusive and expensive Bertram's Hotel in London. But, this being a Miss Marple mystery, she hardly has time to get out her knitting bag before the mysterious occurences begin. This edition is a good well-made hardcover edition at an exceptional price, and clearly the one you want to buy. My tepid rating comes from a feeling that--without giving the plot away--Christie overreached herself with this one, and wrote a kind of crime novel perhaps better suited to other authors. I don't regret buying it, but I'm glad the other Marples are different.

At Bertram's Hotel: A Miss Marple Mystery (Agatha Christie Collection)
This Miss Marple mystery has our sleuth stay mostly in the background while a young girl, her guardians, her distant mother and Scotland Yard tangle with high level robberies and the mystery surrounding the old-fashioned Bertram's hotel. Miss Marple sees beyond surface appearances and the book has a satisfying ending.
I'm glad new copies are available because I add to my collection of these timeless mysteries.

This is not the book that Agatha Christie wrote. There are major differences in punctuation, word choices, and scene breaks between the original Collins and Dodd Mead editions of this novel. There are further differences between the Dodd Mead editions republished by Random House/Avenel and the Dodd Mead editions republished by Simon & Shuster/Pocket. What "improvements" have been made for the Signet edition? For every publishing house putting out her works, there seem to be a new batch of editors altering Agatha Christie's words and the sound of her voice. What's the matter with these publishers? Whose voice do they think we want to hear when we sit down to a novel by Agatha Christie? And what will she sound like twenty years from now? It's frightening that her estate has failed to see the importance of guarding her words as she wrote them. Please tell me I'm not the only one here who senses that a crime has been committed.

Agatha Christie had a tendency, throughout her distinguished writing career, to inject international intrigue into her mysteries, ergo, the Tommy and Tuppence entries. This one also captures that sweeping idea, only it features Miss Marple instead.

The scene of the crime, for the most part, is at Bertram's Hotel, which features perfect, old-time, nostalgic lodging, primarily for aristocratic Brits and for American tourists who are drooling to savour the stereotypical English "experience". But one swarthy and infamous race-car driver does fracture the pristine ambiance of the hotel's lobby with his prickly presence when he apparently shows up to visit his beau, a well-known adventuress who is lodged there.

A man is killed (shot), literally on the Hotel steps and sub-plots of thefts and robberies all around England prevail contemporaneously. An absent-minded cleric also goes missing. Of course, Miss Marple teams up with the local Police Chief Inspector to crack these incongruous cases.

If the work has a flaw, it's the implausibility of the action, leaning toward that of what one might experience while viewing a James Bond film, only not quite so high-tech. Overall, though, I enjoyed the book, albeit I confess to being a huge fan of Christie.

Not Christie's best but pretty good.

Stepping into Bertram's Hotel is like stepping into England of the past, right down to the maids and servers who work there. Everone fits ths part pefectly. All the right people stay there, a mix of nobility, clergy and fine old dames, and people seek out the hotel to have just that experience - a step back in time. Miss Marple has decided to take her vacation at Bertram's Hotel, a place she stayed at when she was a young girl. To her great pleasure and surprise, she sees that everything at Bertram's is just as she remembered it, well, not quite, for everything is not quite what it seems to be at Bertram's Hotel.

The plot revolves around a cast of characters staying at the hotel, and then mixes in Scotland Yard who are trying to solve a string of bank and train heists. When Chief-Inspector Davy makes a connection between some eye-witness accounts and Bertram's Hotel, he decides to check the place out. Initially, he is just as struck as Miss Marple at the atmosphere of the hotel, but he definitely smells a rat, and knows somehow that Bertram's is involved with the case the Yard is trying to solve. What follows is a masterfully woven mystery about an absent-minded clergyman who has 'disappeared' and a young heiress intent upon knowing how much money she will inherit (or who will inherit it if she dies). The matter becomes all the more pertinent when a hotel worker is killed, leaving Davy with no doubt that Bertram's is a facade.

"At Bertram's Hotel" is as fast-paced as all of Christie's works are: the reader never wants to put the book down because you need to know what happens next. Miss Marple's methods of deduction fit in perfectly with the mood of this novel, and she winds up giving the Chief-Inspector a hand in solving the case, naturally, although the inspector is just as sharp-eyed as Miss Marple. The conclusion is both rushed and unhurried, and the story is left with a delightful air of uncertainty at the very end.