The Moving Finger

First Published: Serialized in the US in Colliers Magazine 1942. New York, Dodd Mead, 1942. London, William Collins, 1943.

I Read: The Moving Finger (New York, Harper, 2011)

Series: Miss Marple

Summary: On the advice of his doctor, Jerry Burton and his sister Joanna decide to take a country home for several months, in order to help facilitate Jerry’s healing after his plane crash, “…go down to the country, take a house, get interested in local politics, in local scandal, in village gossip. Take an inquisitive and violent interest in your neighbors…” (chapt. 1, pg. 2). The local scandal comes to Jerry and Joanna, when they receive an anonymous poison pen letter accusing the siblings of a much less proper relationship. Laughing it off, they don’t think much of it, until they discover a number of their neighbors have received similar letters, accusing them of all sorts of preposterous activities. It’s not until a suicide and then a murder rocks the village of Lymstock, that Miss Marple arrives and works with Jerry to solve this mystery.

Review: I really liked this book, Jerry, who narrates the entire book, I found to be a very likable character who developed into a stronger and more confident character the more embroiled in the village’s mystery/gossip/scandal he became. The mystery itself is very clever, and Christie had me looking in the completely wrong direction for the entire book as I thought the completely wrong family member was responsible for the murder! I found, surprisingly enough, that I enjoyed being fooled for the better part of the novel. This is one which I plan on reading again, when I find a copy of the UK edition!

The Moving Finger I feel is a curious book. The main protagonist, the one which the series is named for, Miss Marple, does not appear in the story until chapter 10. The sticky wicket here is, there are only 15 chapters in the whole book and she doesn‘t appear in the 15th chapter. While I read the book, the more I started to wondered when she was going to appear and do her magic. I know this is blasphemous, but I am not sure how critical she was to the story, as Jerry was doing a good job of working towards the solution on his own. Miss Marple was almost more of a writing device – a deus ex machina (an ancient Greek term meaning, the only solution to the problems on stage, is to have the gods descend and provide the needed solution and explanation). While not a god, Miss Marple’s intervention is used by Christie as an efficient way to wrap the tangled set of problems; clarifying Jerry’s thoughts & deductions, then devising a clever plan to apprehend the real culprit. Which I maintain Jerry and the police would have been able to do on their own, given a few more pages. So while this book is included in the Marple series, in my heart of hearts, I think of it more as a stand-alone, with a cameo by a famous sleuth.

One entertaining thought which kept flitting through my head as I read The Moving Finger was Victor Borge’s comedy sketch about Inflationary Language. Inflationary Language, if you haven’t heard of it before, (if you have, you can skip to the next paragraph) is a bit inspired by a bout of inflation experienced by the Danish economy; all numbers go up, “Prices – anything to do with money goes up, except the language. See we have hidden numbers in the language…all these numbers can be inflated and meet the economy by rising to the occasion. I suggest we add one to each number…” (a passage I have done my best to write down from a youtube video). Then much hilarity ensues as he reads a passage from a book, seriously it is very funny. I have included the video below.

Several times in The Moving Finger, the phrase, “You’re a woman in a thousand.” (Chapt. 11, pg. 181) is uttered by a character. This, it seems to me, to be a precursor to the phase we now use: You’re one in a million! Same sentiment, different number, an inflated number…. Thus, making me chuckle each and every time I read the older phrase. Remembering how I giggled, in my grandparent’s basement one summer‘s day, to my grandfather’s record of Victor Borge and the Inflationary Language track (btw if you haven‘t heard his thoughts on Phonetic Punctuation, you really must!).

Favorite Quote:

“The human mind prefers to be spoon-fed with the thoughts of others, but deprived of such nourishment it will, reluctantly, begin to think for itself – and such thinking, remember, is original thinking and may have valuable results.” (Chapt. 6, pg. 78)

Interesting Notes: When Christie was writing Miss Marple’s The Moving Finger, she was also writing N Or M?, featuring Tuppence and Tommy Beresford. She alternated between the two manuscripts, she believed it kept her writing fresh and interesting. Christie also listed The Moving Finger as one of her all time favorites!

Another interesting fact: the US and UK versions of this book are evidently very different from each other. The reason behind this, it is widely theorized, is The Moving Finger was published serialized form in Colliers Magazine in the US almost a year before the book was released in the UK. It is thought that Penguin Books published the magazine edited version rather than the original manuscript which Christie wrote. What I find even more incredible is the fact this mistake on the publisher’s part to this day hasn’t been corrected, meaning the US audience is reading, from what I understand, a much different version than the one which Christie originally penned.

Cheating: No I did not cheat, I found it wasn’t as difficult as it has been with other books (perhaps because I read the bulk of the book while sitting next to my eagle-eyed husband). I did have a vague but controllable itch to know if I had guessed correctly who the culprit was!