Collins English Readers The Moving Finger Lymstock is a small town with lots of secrets. Recently there has been an outbreak of anonymous hate-mail. The outbreak becomes more serious when one of the recipients of the letters, Mrs Symmington, commits suicide. Who is writing the letters? And why? It is someone in the small town and people no longer know who they can trust.

In this exclusive authorized edition from the Queen of Mystery, the indomitable sleuth Miss Marple is led to a small town with shameful secrets.

Lymstock is a town with more than its share of scandalous secrets—a town where even a sudden outbreak of anonymous hate mail causes only a minor stir.

But all that changes when one of the recipients, Mrs. Symmington, commits suicide. Her final note says “I can’t go on,” but Miss Marple questions the coroner’s verdict of suicide. Soon nobody is sure of anyone—as secrets stop being shameful and start becoming deadly.

I can’t tell you when I first read The Moving Finger, but I was fortunate enough that by this time I had become aware that Stacey’s Bookstore in downtown San Francisco sold British copies of Christie’s books.

The Tom Adams covers captivated me, and Finger was one of the titles I snatched up. Therefore, all my life, I

have been familiar only with the complete, unexpurgated and correct version of this novel. While the U.S. stripped the manuscript of backstory and character development, I assure you that my evaluation takes in every wonderful moment Christie intended for us to spend in the village of Lymstock.

Introduce

According to John Curran, the first ideas for this novel were found in a Notebook item dated 1940. In this set of circumstances we find the name “Miss Marple.”

Therefore, we can deduce that Christie intended from the start to write a mystery for that good lady. Like The Murder at the Vicarage and the first (best) part of The Body in the Library, Finger is set in a village that, if not St.

Mary Mead, is just as rich and well-populated as Miss Marple’s home. The basic premise of a rash of filthy

anonymous letters, with its connotations of repressed spinsterhood, is also right up Miss Marple’s alley.

We will ultimately have to address the elephant in the room – or, given the paucity of Miss Marple’s presence on

the pages of this novel – the elephant in the back yard dipping its toe through the parlor door.

The fact that her arrival is not only incredibly late but results in a complete reassessment of our narrator’s place in the proceedings must be taken into account.

question of whether or not this issue hurts The Moving Finger continues to this day to divide Christie fans.

This is still a novel that I love and highly recommend.

But even as I begin this post, in ranking it as a Miss Marple novel, I find myself torn.