The Moving Finger is Agatha Christie’s third novel starring Miss Marple, the fluffy pink-and-white old lady whose shrewd deductions and knowledge of human nature make solving crimes a piece of cake. It is set in the seemingly peaceful village of Lymstock, where Jerry Burton comes to stay to recover from his accident in the war, along with his attractive sister Joanna. They enjoy the village’s old fashioned and quiet charm and are amused by the interesting and varied occupants. They become particularly interested in the Symmington family. Mr and Mrs Symmington are wholly occupied in the lives of their two little boys but completely ignore their twenty-year-old daughter Megan, whom they treat as a child.
The Burtons’ belief in the placidity of the village is shattered when Jerry receives a particularly nasty anonymous letter with false but hurtful accusations. He hears from the village doctor that many occupants of the town have been receiving these ‘poison pen’ letters, with ludicrously false claims yet creating suspicion and bad feeling among the simple village folk. The letters stop being merely unpleasant when Mrs Symmington commits suicide after reading such a letter. Everyone who has since received an anonymous letter (and is willing to admit it) hands them over to the police, who bring in an expert to examine them and search for a possible suspect.
Jerry and Joanna invite Megan to stay at their house for a while after her mother’s death, and Jerry befriends Megan, who is socially awkward but has a bright mind and is pleasant when she chooses to be. Jerry helps Superintendent Nash with his inquiries regarding the letters and discovers the book from which the anonymous letter writer cuts his words from. The murder of the Symmington’s housemaid stirs things up even further. Jerry and Joanna meet Miss Marple, a guest at the vicarage, and put the pieces of the murder puzzle in front of her to solve.
Read the novel to discover how Miss Marple enlisted Megan’s help in bringing the murderer to justice and see how blackmail nearly led to another murder. I found this novel fun and engaging; narrated by Jerry himself, it spares us the rambling descriptions of Miss Marple’s thoughts and is full of light and humorous conversations between the brother-sister duo. There is a slight undercurrent of romance that is often present in Christie’s novels, which is not overdone. Every mystery is satisfactorily and sometimes unexpectedly rounded off in the end.
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