The Thirteen Problems is a short story collection by British writer Agatha Christie, first published in the UK by Collins Crime Club on 18 June 1932Chris Peers, Ralph Spurrier and Jamie Sturgeon. Collins Crime Club – A checklist of First Editions. Dragonby Press (Second Edition) March 1999 (p. 14) and in the US by Dodd, Mead and Company in 1933 under the title The Tuesday Club Murders.John Cooper and B.A. Pyke. Detective Fiction – the collector's guide: Second Edition (pp. 82, 87) Scholar Press. 1994; The UK edition retailed at seven shillings and sixpence (7/6) and the US edition at $2.00. The thirteen stories feature the amateur detective Miss Marple, her nephew Raymond West, and her friend Sir Henry Clithering. They are the earliest stories Christie wrote about Miss Marple, the individual stories having originally appeared in various magazines between 1927 and 1931. The main setting for the frame story is the fictional village of St Mary Mead.
Plot introduction As in her short story collection Partners in Crime, Christie employs an overarching narrative, making the book more like an episodic novel. There are three sets of narratives, though they themselves interrelate. The first set of six are stories told by the "Tuesday Night Club", a random gathering of people at the house of Miss Marple. Each week the group tell tales of mystery, always solved by the female amateur detective from the comfort of her armchair. One of the guests is Sir Henry Clithering, an ex-Commissioner of Scotland Yard, and this allows Christie to resolve the story, with him usually pointing out that the criminals were caught.
Sir Henry Clithering invites Miss Marple to a dinner party, where the next set of six stories are told. The group of guests employ a similar guessing game, and once more Miss Marple triumphs. The thirteenth story, "Death by Drowning", takes place some time after the dinner party when Miss Marple finds out that Clithering is staying in St Mary Mead and asks him to help in the investigation surrounding the death of a local village girl. At the start of the story Miss Marple secretly works out who the murderer is and her solution proves correct.
Plots
The Tuesday Night Club A group of friends are meeting at the house of Miss Marple in St Mary Mead. As well as the old lady herself, there is her nephew – the writer Raymond West – the artist Joyce Lemprière, Sir Henry Clithering (a former Scotland Yard commissioner), a clergyman called Dr Pender, and Mr Petherick, a solicitor. The conversation turns to unsolved mysteries; Raymond, Joyce, Pender, and Petherick all claim that their professions are ideal for solving crimes. Joyce suggests that they form a club; every Tuesday night, a member of the group must tell of a real mystery, and the others will attempt to solve it. Sir Henry agrees to participate, and Miss Marple brightly volunteers herself to round out the group.
Sir Henry tells the first story of three people who sat down to a supper after which all of them fell ill, supposedly of food poisoning, and one died as a result. The three people were a Mr and Mrs Jones and the wife's companion, Miss Clark, and it was Mrs Jones who died. Mr Jones was a commercial traveller; a maid in one of the hotels in which he stayed saw blotting paper he had used to write a letter, whose decipherable phrases referred to his dependency on his wife's money, her death, and "hundreds and thousands". The maid read of the death in a paper and, knowing relatives in the same village where Mr and Mrs Jones lived, wrote to them. This started a chain of gossip which led to the exhumation of the body and the discovery that Mrs Jones was poisoned with arsenic. There was further gossip linking Mr Jones to the doctor's daughter, but there was nothing substantive there. The Jones's maid, Gladys, tearfully confirmed that all three people had been served the same meal of tinned lobster, bread and cheese, and trifle. She had also prepared a bowl of cornflour for Mrs Jones to calm her stomach, but Miss Clark ate this, despite the diet she was on for her consistent weight problems. Jones also had a plausible explanation for the letter which was blotted in the hotel room.
The people in the room deliver their various theories as to who the murderer is, but neglect to ask Miss Marple, until Sir Henry politely points out the omission. Miss Marple witters on about a similar case involving a local family (to which Raymond cannot see any relevance) until she suddenly asks Sir Henry if Gladys confessed, and says that she hopes Mr Jones will hang for what he made the poor girl do. The letter in the hotel room was to Gladys. Hundreds and thousands refers to sweets sprinkled atop the dessert; Mr Jones had mixed arsenic with them and given them to Gladys to use for the trifle. Miss Clark had not eaten the dessert (due to her diet) and Mr Jones scraped off the poisoned sweets. Sir Henry confirms that Miss Marple is correct. Mr Jones had got Gladys pregnant and used a promise of marriage after his wife's death to persuade the girl to commit murder. He then married someone else. The baby died shortly after its birth and Gladys confessed while dying.
The Idol House of Astarte The group meets the following week and it is the turn of Dr Pender to tell his story. His tale is one in which a man was struck down by "no human agency". It took place at a house on the edge of Dartmoor called "Silent Grove" which was newly purchased by Sir Richard Haydon, an old college friend of the doctor's. Dr Pender was invited to a house party there, where they were joined by seven other people including a striking society beauty named Diana Ashley. Sir Richard was much attracted to her, as were most of the other men in the party, and she bewitched them all in turn. On the moor outside the house were several relics of the Stone Age and within the grounds of the house was a grove of trees which Sir Richard fancied was an authentic grove of Astarte, in the centre of which he had built a rough temple in the form of a stone summerhouse. Diana Ashley was enthused enough by the grove and the structure it contained to wildly suggest a moonlit orgy to the goddess of the Moon, a suggestion which, unsurprisingly, was vetoed by Dr Pender and some of the others, part of their objection being a feeling of evil that the setting provoked in their imaginations.
Toned down to a fancy dress party, Diana's suggestion was accepted by the others to take place that night, and preparations happily took place. Diana's shapeless dress, titled 'the unknown', disappointed the group for its lack of imagination, and during the party she disappeared, last being seen heading towards the grove. The others followed and found her in her true costume, magnificently adorned in the moonlight as a priestess of Astarte. She warned the others not to approach but Sir Richard did and promptly collapsed on the ground. When he was examined by his cousin, Elliot, and then Dr Symonds, they found he was dead, killed by a stab to the heart, but no one was seen to approach him and no weapon was found on the grassy floor. They took the body into the house and the police were called. Not satisfied, Elliot went back alone to the grove to investigate further and later the others found him struck down in the same spot with a knife wound in his shoulder and the knife in his hand. His story was one of seeing an illusion of the goddess and then being struck down himself. The knife was identified as one dug up from a barrow on the moor, which was kept in Sir Richard's house. The police suspected Diana but had no proof or explanation as to how she could have committed the crime.
The members of the Tuesday Club debate possible solutions between them but Miss Marple hits on the correct one: although she does not know what caused Sir Richard to stumble – possibly a trip over a tree root – it was his cousin Elliot who quickly stabbed him in the pretence of examining him. The knife was hidden as part of his fancy dress costume. Dr Pender confirms that five years later, Elliot wrote to him on the eve of an expedition to the South Pole admitting the crime and the torment he has suffered since. His motive was love for Diana Ashley, and by killing his cousin he both removed a rival and inherited his wealth. He hoped to atone for his crime and assuage his guilt by dying honourably, which the clergyman confirms he did. Although Dr Pender has disguised the names, Sir Henry has recognized the case and the persons involved in it.
Ingots of Gold Raymond West takes his turn in telling a story. It took place two years earlier when Raymond spent Whitsun in Cornwall with a recent acquaintance called John Newman. He was something of an authority on the Spanish Armada and had bought the salvage rights to a shipwreck from the Armada which sank off the coast and eluded many attempts at recovery over the years. Travelling by train to Newman's house in the village of Polperran, Raymond shared a carriage with Police Inspector Badgworth who knew of the Spanish treasure trove but was specifically interested in the more recent wreck of a ship called the RMS Otranto. The latter sank six months earlier and its bullion had either been removed from the ship's strongroom after the hull had been torn open on the rocks of Serpent's Point, or stolen some time before. The Inspector was investigating the matter.
Arriving in Cornwall, Raymond settled into Newman's house and the following day went with him to the local pub, The Three Anchors, where he immediately felt suspicious of the landlord, Mr Kelvin, who made meaningful comments about the police and other "foreigners" looking into local matters. The next day, Sunday, saw a storm brewing over the area, and this coincided with Raymond having a feeling of foreboding. This feeling was justified when Newman went out for a walk that night and failed to return, although his disappearance was not noticed until the following day. A search was set up and the missing man was found bound and gagged in a local ditch. His story was that he spotted some men bringing something onto a beach by boat in a local spot appropriately called "Smuggler's Cove" and then putting the cargo into a local cave. The men set upon him, bound him and drove him to the ditch in a lorry. Badgworth found evidence that the cave had been used to store something but, more importantly, tyre tracks on the route on which Newman was taken matched a tyre on a lorry owned by Mr Kelvin. A night nurse of a neighbour testified the lorry was never taken out of its garage on the night in question. Kelvin evaded arrest and Raymond didn't know the solution to the mystery.
Again it is Miss Marple who hits on the solution, when she admonishes her nephew on his choice of friends, and Sir Henry confirms that he knows something of the case and that the old lady is right. Newman is not the man's real name and he is now in Princetown Prison for the theft of gold from a London strongroom. He used the wreck and smuggling story to cover his tracks and Kelvin was set up as a scapegoat. The landlord's lorry was never used, but a tyre was taken off it during the night and put on another lorry to provide the "evidence". Newman's accomplice was probably his gardener whom Raymond saw working on a bed of rose trees on the Monday morning when they realised Newman was "missing" – as Miss Marple states, real gardeners never work on Whit Monday!
The Blood-Stained Pavement