A Murder is Announced: Book Review

Today, we will be reviewing A Murder is Announced by Agatha Christie, Miss Marple book number five. Keep reading to find out what we thought of this novel and if you should read this classic Christie novel next!

A Murder is Announced Summary

An advertisement is placed in the newspaper that reads “A murder is announced and will take place on Friday, 29 October, at Little Paddocks, at 6.30 pm. Friends accept this, the only intimation.”

This comes as a surprise to Letitia Blacklock, the owner of Little Paddocks as well as other residents of the household. When the day and time finally happens, a bunch of people show up. 

At exactly 6:30 pm, the lights turn off, the door swings up and someone yells “Stick em up!” Three shots are fired and when the lights back on, Miss Blacklock is bleeding from her ear and a masked man is lying dead on the ground.

While it may initially seem like an open and close case, some things don’t add up. Why did the masked name, Rudy Scherz, a lowly criminal, choose to burglarize Little Paddocks? Miss Marple decides to do some digging and ends up turning up old wills and a lot more at stake than meets the eye.

Commentary

A Murder is Announced was released in 1950 in both the U.S. and the U.K and was touted as Agatha Christie’s 50^th book. But to reach that number, you have to also count Christie’s U.S. and U.K short stories collection. You can tell that the publication was trying to make the number 50 work no matter what.

The novel is a fun mystery and I love the setup. It is quite different from Christie’s usual mysteries and does throw the typical Christie reader out of their element. That added to me enjoying this novel and I was nowhere near figuring out who the actual murderer was. 

This was one of Christie’s novels where there were just too many characters and I lost track of a lot of them. Christie loves introducing characters to make the suspect list bigger and it was a bit frustrating because a bunch of characters weren’t even who they said they were. There is a lot of drama and the reveals are funny at times, which I don’t even know was intentional or not.

Conclusion

As a Christie fan, I have read all sorts of novels. But even after reading dozens of Christie novels, I marvel at Christie’s ingenuity and different plots. This one feels fresh and highlights why Christie is the queen of mystery. I highly recommend this and hope you have better luck figuring out who the murderer is than I did. Happy reading!

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