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Finished "The Thirteen Problems" by Agatha Christie. This is a collection of "Miss Marple" short stories, and was her 16th book, and the 2nd featuring Miss Marple, originally published in 1932. The US title is "The Tuesday Club Murders".
As in some of her other short story collections (e.g. Partners in Crime), Christie employs an overarching narrative, making the book more like an episodic novel. There are three sets of narrative, 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.
The next set of six occur as part of a dinner party Miss Marple is invited to at the request of Sir Henry Clithering, as a result of her skill in the Tuesday Night Club. This employs 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. Miss Marple solves the murder by the end.
All the plots are ingenious, and most would have made excellent full-length novels. Very good indeed.
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