A letter from beyond the grave One last request An unsolvable crime 
When Miss Marple receives a letter from the recently deceased millionaire Jason Rafiel, she’s not sure what to make of it.
Knowing her deductive skills, he challenges her to solve a crime. If she does so, she will inherit £20,000.
The only problem is that he has failed to mention who was involved, or where, and when the crime was committed. Jane Marple is intrigued.

I thought ‘Nemesis’  was one of the best Jane Marple novels. It was an intriguing, unconventional mystery. I liked that Jane Marple is set a task by a dead man, who gives her nothing much to go on except his assessment of her ability to recognise evil. This made the story as much about Jane as it was about the mystery that she’d been tasked with solving. From the start, it put Jane in a reflective mood, making her consider what she has to offer and what her abilities say about her. 

I liked that Jane Marple was credibly portrayed as being very old. Agatha Christie was eight-one when ‘Nemesis‘ was published, so she understood both the physical limitations and discomforts that old age brings and what it’s like to live a life that you know is approaching it’s end but is not yet over. This investigation adds some vitality and interest to Jane Marple’s life. At a point where she can no longer tend to her own garden and when a good deal of her time is spent looking backwards, it provides her with a purpose, a mission to focus on that, in the opinion of the dead man who gave it to her, she is uniquely qualified to carry out. 

I enjoyed watching Jane Marple think. I liked that she was doing more than solving a puzzle. She was assessing and reassessing herself and each person that she meets,, so that she can be sure she’s seeing them clearly. Jane Marple understands that she has always had the ability to see the worst in people; to imagine the evil that they might do and why they might do it. She’s also never hesitated to try and hold those people to account. In this case though, when she uncovers evil, she also uncovers a great deal of grief and suffering. Even so, she does what needs to be done to hold the person to account.

It seemed to me that this was a story in which the women were much more important and imagined in more depth than the men. The men, for the most part, are instruments of authority or generators of misogyny and malice. The women are instruments of passion A passion for truth or love or family or justice. Their motives are layered and sometimes muddled but their actions are manifestations of their passions, not their egos.  They see each other more clearly than the men in their lives see them or themselves. 

The attitudes of authority figures to rape and sexual assault accurately reflect the misogyny of the 1970s with victim-blaming, a tendency to minimise the seriousness of the offence and to be willing to show leniency so a young man should not have his life ruined merely because he raped a woman. 

Some people may find this shocking and or anachronistic. I don’t. It seems to me that nothing much has changed in England. ONS figures for 2024 show that only 16% of rapes are reported to the police and only 2.6% of the reported cases result in a charge or prosecution.

I thought ‘Nemesis‘ was very well written. The premise was novel. The characters were well-drawn. The conversations felt real. The plot kept me guessing and the pacing worked This was the writing of an author at the peak of her power. I think it puts paid to the arguments that are sometimes made, based in part on the rather awful ‘Passenger To Frankfurt’, that Christie was in cognitive decline.

I listened to the audiobook version of ‘Nemsis‘. I thought Emilla Fox did a good job of bringing Jane Marple to life. Click on the YouTube link below to hear a sample.