Review: ‘The Blue Geranium’ by Agatha Christie #AgathaChristieSS24

‘The Blue Geranium’ is the second short story that Fanda @ Fanda Classic Lit has chosen as the June picks for her #AgathaChristieSS24 where we read two short stories she’s selected every month. While I’ve been doing a joint review of so far, this month as one of her picks turned out a cat story, I reviewed it for Reading the Meow last week.

The Blue Geranium is a Miss Marple short story from the very first collection featuring the elderly sleuth, Thirteen Problems (also titled The Tuesday Club Murders) and while I remembered I’d read it before, from the name alone I recalled nothing of it until I started reading. But even then, what came back to me was howdunit and not the who and I’d clean forgotten many of the smaller details.

 The broad context of the stories in this collection which essentially sees Miss Marple play armchair detective is a series of dinner parties/gatherings where guests present intriguing problems for the others to solve. In the first six, a group of guests including former Scotland Yard Commissioner Sir Henry Clithering and Miss Marple’s nephew Raymond West gather for dinner every Tuesday where each guest shares a strange or curious mystery they have come across leaving it for the others to work out. Needless to say, it is the lacy, fragile Miss Marple who gets to the right answer each time. The pattern is repeated in the next six where another set of guests form the group though Sir Henry continues to be a common link. Here each is narrated over the course of the same evening. The final story in the collection is an exception with a ‘fresh’ murder case which only Miss Marple knows to be a murder.

‘The Blue Geranium’ is the first of the second set where Sir Henry is staying with Col. Arthur and Dolly Bantry, characters we know from later books as well, and this is at a time when Dolly is unaware of Miss Marple’s skills seeing her only as a ‘typical old maid of fiction’ and ‘an old dear but hopelessly behind the times’. Sir Henry though is a confirmed fan. Surprised, shocked even when Sir Henry tells her of Miss Marple’s skills, she isn’t however inclined to disbelieve him and invites Miss Marple to dinner where Arthur will share his ‘ghost story’.

The story is of his friend George Pritchard whose wife is one of those perpetual invalids with nothing in particular wrong with her. She has had a succession of nurses and also seems to have a weakness for clairvoyants and fortune tellers consulting a whole lot. But when a previously unknown fortune teller, Zarida a psychic reader is invited and then later makes some dour predictions, Mrs Pritchard begins to genuinely become afraid. George is unwilling to believe in all this but when some of the signs Zarida has mentioned start to become real, he is at a loss for what to do. Then the inevitable happens and Mrs Pritchard dies. Did she simply die of fright or was there more to it? Before long, rumours start to fly.

This was an entertaining story combining science, the supernatural (or at least the appearance of it) and of course being a Miss Marple story, also basic human nature. Christie once again uses her knowledge of poisons and other facts she would have picked up from her days as a VAD which work well here. How things were done is explained but I didn’t go too deeply into the details in terms of how they were practically accomplished whether there may have been some weaknesses there.

Unlike Christie’s usual short stories where there is not often scope for working things out (unlike the full-length works replete with clues if one looks, though one usually realises in retrospect), in this one if one had applied one’s mind, there is one clue that Miss Marple spells out that would have likely pointed one to the who.

While I enjoyed the puzzle itself especially since I hadn’t remembered whodunit, I also liked being reminded of how Miss Marple becomes friends with the Bantrys and how Dolly becomes aware of her sleuthing skills, something she relies on when trouble comes to their door later in Body in the Library. I remember Dolly being quite sharp from the later book and she shows signs of this here as well, seeing things almost though not quite as well as Miss Marple, while Arthur is rather the opposite, not too bright (actually a little thick, may be), a little too trusting (though his trust isn’t misplaced) but a good-hearted person all the same.

This was a fun revisit as always is the case with Christie and I love how even in these short pieces one doesn’t remember every little detail leaving one something to enjoy on each revisit.