The Thirteen Problems

Short story collection by Agatha Christie

The Thirteen Problems is a short story collection by British writer Agatha Christie, first published in the UK by Collins Crime Club in June 1932 and in the US by Dodd, Mead and Company in 1933 under the title The Tuesday Club Murders. The UK edition retailed at seven shillings and sixpence (7/6)
Miss Marple predicts that Greta being associated with criminals will come to a miserable end; Miss Marple also recommends to Sir Henry that he write a letter to Gertrud explaining she has been cleared of suspicion of murder.

The ladies are prevailed upon to tell a story, and Miss Marple relates a tale from a time when she was staying at Keston Spa Hydro just before Christmas. Feeling that older and more experienced people's feelings and intuitions are too often easily dismissed when such feelings are based on facts and experience, she relates how, when she saw a couple called Jack and Gladys Sanders together, she just knew that the husband meant to murder his wife. The motive was money; they were living off her income but could not touch the capital in her lifetime, but she could will the money away and had done so in favour of her husband. Miss Marple's feelings were confirmed when she shared a tram ride with the couple and witnessed Mr Sanders "tripping" on the stairs onto his wife who then fell down, but was fortunately saved by the conductor. The atmosphere of on coming tragedy was heightened when the hall porter died from pneumonia, followed soon after by one of the hydro's housemaids who died of blood poisoning. Miss Marple dates the tragedy from when Mr Sanders overheard her and two other ladies talking about this latter death. His wife was out playing bridge with friends, and early in the evening Mr Sanders returned from a trip out with two of his friends and asked Miss Marple and the other ladies' opinions on an evening bag that he'd bought for his wife as a Christmas present. They went up to his room and saw the body of Mrs Sanders on the floor, felled by a sandbag. Immediately suspicious, Miss Marple refused to allow the husband to touch the body, and insisted the door be locked and the police called. Miss Marple noticed the woman's hat was lying beside the body, although previously she had been wearing it. Prompted by the police, she also noticed that the dead woman was no longer wearing earrings, as she had been when the body was first discovered. Mrs Sanders's other jewellery was missing, and the police were certain the thief came back after killing the woman and gained entry by means of the fire escape. Mrs Sanders had been summoned back to the hydro from her bridge game by a mysterious telephone call, but her husband had a perfect alibi for the time in question, that is after she had left the bridge game but before the discovery of the body. It took Miss Marple two days to guess the truth; she then asked the police to try the discarded hat on the dead woman's head – it didn't fit. She realised that the body they saw and quickly locked in the room when they first discovered it was not that of Mrs Sanders, but that of the dead housemaid, which was awaiting collection by the undertakers. Sanders had put the body there when his wife was playing bridge, and then rushed into the grounds after the "discovery", supposedly overcome with grief. There he had met his wife returning from the game, summoned by him on the telephone using an alias, somehow persuaded her up to their room by means of the fire escape, killed her, and then swapped the clothes, returning the dead housemaid to her room. The one thing he couldn't do was put the hat back on his wife's head, as her shingled hair meant it didn't fit. The cheap hat they found was the property of the housemaid, as Mrs Sanders's hat cupboard was locked when her husband was placing the dead girl in his room, and a hat was needed to cover the face. Mr Sanders was hanged for his wife's murder.

A reluctant Mrs Bantry is prevailed upon to take her turn. She relates how she and her husband were guests of Sir Ambrose Bercy at his house at Clodderham Court. Sage leaves were picked from the garden for dinner that night, but unfortunately foxglove was growing among the sage, and it was also included in the stuffing for the meal of duck. All of the people at dinner were ill but one of them – Sir Ambrose's ward, Sylvia Keene – died. The inquest heard that death was due to poisoning by digitalis. Among the party was a young man called Jerry Lorimer who was engaged to Sylvia, to the opposition of Sir Ambrose; but, after a year of the engagement, Sir Ambrose had given in. Also there was Maud Wye, supposedly a friend of Jerry, but Mrs Bantry had seen Jerry kissing her one evening. Six months after Sylvia's death, the two were married. Dr Lloyd is puzzled as a fatal poisoning by the use of foxglove leaves – if it was an accident – is difficult to achieve; the alkaloid has to be extracted with great care and Sir Henry latches onto the main problem of the case, namely: how do you ensure that only your victim dies if you poison everyone, including yourself (assuming the murderer to be one of the house party)? It was Sylvia herself who picked the foxglove leaves and Dr Lloyd wonders if the intended victim was Sir Ambrose, who was prescribed drugs for his heart condition. Miss Marple latches onto this clue and finds the solution – Sir Ambrose's drug was digitalin. He planted the foxglove seed among the sage a long time before, and mild poisoning ensued at the dinner party, but somehow he fed his ward further doses at the same time from his own drug, thereby killing her but making it look like an accident. The motive was jealousy – he was in love with his ward and determined that she wouldn't marry Lorimer. Mrs Bantry confirms that she received a letter from Sir Ambrose after he died, to be posted to her in the event of his death, in which he confessed to the crime.

Jane Helier, the beautiful but somewhat vacuous actress, is the last to tell a story. Although she attempts to disguise the fact somewhat by using a false name, the others quickly realise that the story is about herself and, slipping up several times, she soon gives up the pretence and continues. She was on tour in a provincial town when she was summoned to a police station. There had been a burglary at a bungalow and a young man called Leslie Faulkener had been arrested. His story was that he was an unsuccessful playwright and had sent one of his efforts to Jane to read. She had written to him to say that she liked it and inviting him to come down to the bungalow to discuss it. He had gone, been shown in by the parlourmaid, met Jane, and drunk a cocktail. The next thing he knew, he was waking up by the roadside. He staggered along and was quickly picked up by the police. The bungalow belonged to Sir Herman Cohen, a rich city gent, and in it he had installed his mistress. She was an actress called Mary Kerr, the wife of another actor, called Claude Leeson (although Jane admits these are not the people's real names). Someone calling herself Miss Kerr had rung up the police, told them the bungalow had been burgled, and described Leslie Faulkener as having visited there earlier that day, but having been refused admittance. He was later seen by a maid as gaining entrance through a window to steal Miss Kerr's jewellery. The police did indeed find the bungalow rifled and a large quantity of jewels missing. Miss Kerr soon returned but denied any knowledge of the affair or even of having rung up the police. Both she and the maid had been summoned away for the day on separate false pretexts and had never been in the bungalow when Mr Faulkener visited (whether by invitation or not). When Jane was brought face to face with Faulkener at the police station, he stated that this was not the woman he met at the bungalow, and the note was proven not to be in Jane's handwriting. Faulkener was released through lack of evidence. Sir Herman tried to hush the matter up but failed, and his wife started divorce proceedings when she found out about the affair with the actress. The guests of the Bantrys try to guess the solution but fail, and are annoyed when Jane claims she does not know the true solution herself. The group disperse for the night, their six stories told, and Miss Marple whispers something in Jane's ear that causes the actress to cry out in shock. Later she confesses to Mrs Bantry that the story she told never happened, but Jane was thinking of carrying out such a scheme against an actress who enticed one of her previous husbands away from her. Jane and her understudy concocted the set up. Miss Marple's warning was for Jane not to put herself at the mercy of the understudy, who may prove untrustworthy in the future. Jane decides not to proceed with the plan – there might be other Miss Marples out there who would find her out.

Some time has passed since the six people met at the Bantry home, and Sir Henry is once again a guest there when news reaches the house early one morning that a local girl called Rose Emmott has been found drowned in the river near to the mill. Local gossip was that she was pregnant by a young man called Rex Sandford, who is an architect from London, and the local feeling now is that she killed herself, unable to face her father with the truth. Later in the morning, Sir Henry receives a visit from an upset Miss Marple who tells him that Rose was murdered, and she doesn't want the wrong man to be hanged for the crime. She tells him that while she believes she knows who the murderer is, she has no proof whatsoever. She asks him to investigate for her, just to see what he can make of it, and to attempt to discover if the person she suspects was involved or not. She writes the name of the suspect on a piece of paper and gives it to Sir Henry, who reads it and sets out to investigate. With some reluctance, Sir Henry meets Melchett and Inspector Drewitt, who is investigating the case. By now the police know that the girl did not commit suicide, as bruises have been found on her upper arm where she was grabbed before being thrown in the river, and a small boy walking in the woods nearby on the evening before heard her cry and found her body. Sir Henry joins the two policemen as they continue their investigations. They meet Rose's father who runs the village pub. He definitely thinks Sandford is the murderer. They call on the architect, who confesses that he is the father of the unborn child and that he wrote a note to Rose, suggesting a meeting at the river, when she insisted on speaking with him. He walked through the woods near the river but failed to keep the appointment. He is told that he is the prime suspect in the case, and not to leave his house. To wrap matters up, the three men visit the cottage of a widow, Mrs Bartlett, who has a young lodger, Joe Ellis, staying with her. This young man was besotted with Rose, and he states that he would have married Rose and brought up the baby as his own. At the time of the murder, he was putting up some shelves in Mrs Bartlett's kitchen and she can provide his alibi. At Sir Henry's insistence, they interview the small boy who heard the cry from Rose before she entered the water. He saw Sandford in the woods and thinks he also heard Joe Ellis whistling. He definitely saw two men with what seemed to be a wheelbarrow in the gathering dusk. Sir Henry, defeated in his attempt to clear Sandford, visits Miss Marple, who tells him Mrs Bartlett couldn't have been home on a Friday – the night in question. She takes in washing as extra income and on Fridays she takes it round in an old pram. Sir Henry goes back to Mrs Bartlett's where Joe confesses to being in the woods, but denies hurting Rose. He then confronts Mrs Bartlett to the effect that she too was in the woods near the river. The "wheelbarrow" that was seen was the pram with the washing, and it was Mrs Bartlett who threw Rose in the water, as she herself was in love with Joe. Not wanting to see the young man hanged, she confesses, but is puzzled as to how Sir Henry knew. He recalls the note Miss Marple gave him, naming Mrs Bartlett as the murderer.

In The Tuesday Night Club, Raymond West's future spouse is named as Joyce Lemprière, but in later works involving Miss Marple, Joyce is rechristened Joan. Similarly, a guest at the Bantry's household, Doctor Lloyd, is a general practitioner in St Mary Mead as opposed to the later physician, Doctor Haydock. The change in names is unexplained. Jane Helier makes a return in the short story Strange Jest. This story was first published in This Week Magazine in the US in November 1941, and in the UK in The Strand Magazine in July 1944 under the title of The Case of the Buried Treasure. The story was published posthumously as Strange Jest in a short story collection titled Miss Marple's Final Cases and Two Other Stories. Mr Petherick returns in the short story "Miss Marple Tells a Story", which is also included in "Miss Marple's Final Cases and Two Other Stories".

The Times Literary Supplement (8 September 1932) stated, "It is easy to invent an improbable detective, like this elderly spinster who has spent all her life in one village, but by no means so easy to make her detections plausible. Sometimes Miss Marple comes dangerously near those detectives with a remarkable and almost superhuman intuition who solve every mystery as if they knew the answer beforehand, but this is not often and Mrs. Christie shows great skill in adapting her problems so that she can find analogies in Miss Marple's surroundings." The review concluded that "in general these are all problems to try the intellect rather than the nerves of the reader." Isaac Anderson in The New York Times Book Review (5 March 1933) wrote: "The stories are slight in structure, but they present some very pretty problems and introduce us to some truly interesting people. Miss Marple is in a class by herself. She does not call herself a detective, but she could give almost any of the regular sleuths cards and spades and beat him at his own game." The Scotsman of 6 June 1932 declared, "The stories are worthy alike of Mrs Christie's powers of invention, and of the 'Crime Club' series in which they are issued." The Daily Mirror of 13 June 1932 said, "The plots are so good that one marvels at the prodigality which has been displayed, as most of them would have made a full length thriller." Robert Barnard: "Early Marple, in which she solves cases described by other amateur and professional murder buffs gathered in an ad hoc club. Some engaging stories, but the sedentary format (cf. Orczy's Old Man in the Corner stories) becomes monotonous over the book length. Contains one of Christie's few excursions into the working class, Death by Drowning."

In both A Christmas Tragedy and The Herb of Death, Sir Henry Clithering calls Mrs Bantry "Scheherazade", the legendary storyteller of One Thousand and One Nights.