Title: 4:50 from Paddington
Author: Agatha Christie
Type: Fiction
Page Count: 360
Rating: 3.75/5
I’m not quite sure how I’d missed this one up to this point, especially because Miss Marple is pretty much my favourite and this is one of Christie’s Marple novels. It also has a great setup, following what happens when someone on a moving train spots a murder happening on another train that’s momentarily travelling along the rails at the same speed as them.
It was a pretty good read, but it’s hard to rank it at the top of my list of favourite Miss Marples when it’s up against such stiff competition. I did like the way that she went about solving the case though, especially because she played to her strengths by getting other people to help her and finding herself a good base of operations. It’s armchair detecting at its finest.
Still, I probably enjoyed this book the most because of the fact that I think it’s the last of the Miss Marple books that I haven’t read yet, or at least one of the last. It was also interesting to draw a few parallels between this book and The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins. I’m actually surprised I haven’t heard anyone mention it before.
So yeah, it was nice to get back to St. Mary Mead, even if the majority of the book didn’t actually take place there, and I’m definitely glad that I picked this up. Miss Marple is one of my favourite characters in the world, and in fact it’s a bit of a shame that the authorised ghostwriters that create new Christie books are focusing solely on the Hercule Poirot canon. There are already plenty of those, and he’s also a bit of a dick.
So when it comes to the bottom line of whether I’d recommend this one, of course I would. You should read the series through in order though, just to make sure that you make the most of it. Each book is a standalone but you’ll get more from it if you read through in order. Go!
