Customer Reviews

At Bertram's Hotel (G K Hall Large Print Book Series)

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(13)
3 star:		(15)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Miss Marple goes on vacation to stay at Bertram's Hotel. If you were thinking she was going to have some kind of adventure like she did in _A Caribbean Mystery_ or _Nemesis_ while she was on vacation, think again. If you enjoy Miss Marple because she comes up with these wacky village parallels, you are going to be disappointed. There aren't many here. A large part of the detecting is done my Chief Inspector Davy. Miss Marple is merely a side character in this one -- she really isn't super involved except when Davy talks to her during his investigations. She is more a "witness" than a sleuth.

Granted, by this point she is rather old, so at least Christie keeps her doing things within her capabilities!

The description of the hotel are great, and the premise of the plot had some nice possibilities but I don't think this was as well mapped out as some of the other Agatha Christie mysteries. If you are a long time reader, you are going to guess whodunit fairly quickly.

Overall, it's ok, but not one of the best. The Miss Marple short stories (ex: Thirteen Problems) are better.

One of the best of Agatha Christie's later mysteries. Miss Marple has found the perfect spot to stay for her vacation. Nothing ever seems to change at Bertram's Hotel, everything is just as it was before the war. But is this all this charming gentility merely a facade for something far more dangerous?

This novel by the ever wonderful Agatha Christie is very exact and detailed. It had a twisted plot and suspicious characters. But! It was also from several people's point of view. The scene kept changing so you had to say "Okay, who is seeing this and what are they most likely to think". In other titles by Christie the story is from one point of view. The entire story is based around one person's story and mode of thinking. That is why I give Bertram's four and not five stars.

Raymond West's latest novel is doing very well indeed, so he and his painter wife Joan decide to treat Raymond's old Aunt Jane Marple to a holiday. Miss Marple takes this opportunity to visit in London and spend the week in that eminently traditional, eminently expensive bastion of Edwardian hostelry, Bertram's Hotel. On arriving she immediately recalls her visit of many years ago, when she was still a silly schoolgirl, madly in love with a very unsuitable young man. Most things in the hotel seem to be untouched by the greedy monster of modern time and that is the way Miss Marple likes to see it. But something did change: an undefined atmosphere suggests more than the eye can see. When the absent-minded clergyman Canon Pennyfather goes missing, Jane knows that she still can trust her dark premonitions.

Agatha Christie was sixty-six when she wrote At Bertram's Hotel and by doing so proved that she still could recall the spirit of her earlier works. All the elements of a typical Christie mystery are present. The setting is this time an Edwardian hotel full of memories of that golden age (supposedly based on the Brown's Hotel in London). Christie looks back to the good old days with more than just melancholy. The main characters also seemed to have travelled trough time: old spinsters, colonels and clergymen, they all carry past glory as some kind of burden.

When the plot really unfolds, try not to miss the hidden clues, because the conclusion is surprisingly `fair'. If you succeed in ignoring the numerous red herrings, you must be able to solve at least part of the mystery. This is certainly one of the Miss Marple mysteries worth remembering.

This is not the book that Agatha Christie wrote. There are major differences in punctuation, word choices, and scene breaks between the original Collins and Dodd Mead editions of this novel. There are further differences between the Dodd Mead editions republished by Random House/Avenel and the Dodd Mead editions republished by Simon & Shuster/Pocket. What "improvements" have been made for the Signet edition? For every publishing house putting out her works, there seem to be a new batch of editors altering Agatha Christie's words and the sound of her voice. What's the matter with these publishers? Whose voice do they think we want to hear when we sit down to a novel by Agatha Christie? And what will she sound like twenty years from now? It's frightening that her estate has failed to see the importance of guarding her words as she wrote them. Please tell me I'm not the only one here who senses that a crime has been committed.

Stepping into Bertram's Hotel is like stepping into England of the past, right down to the maids and servers who work there. Everone fits ths part pefectly. All the right people stay there, a mix of nobility, clergy and fine old dames, and people seek out the hotel to have just that experience - a step back in time. Miss Marple has decided to take her vacation at Bertram's Hotel, a place she stayed at when she was a young girl. To her great pleasure and surprise, she sees that everything at Bertram's is just as she remembered it, well, not quite, for everything is not quite what it seems to be at Bertram's Hotel.

The plot revolves around a cast of characters staying at the hotel, and then mixes in Scotland Yard who are trying to solve a string of bank and train heists. When Chief-Inspector Davy makes a connection between some eye-witness accounts and Bertram's Hotel, he decides to check the place out. Initially, he is just as struck as Miss Marple at the atmosphere of the hotel, but he definitely smells a rat, and knows somehow that Bertram's is involved with the case the Yard is trying to solve. What follows is a masterfully woven mystery about an absent-minded clergyman who has 'disappeared' and a young heiress intent upon knowing how much money she will inherit (or who will inherit it if she dies). The matter becomes all the more pertinent when a hotel worker is killed, leaving Davy with no doubt that Bertram's is a facade.

"At Bertram's Hotel" is as fast-paced as all of Christie's works are: the reader never wants to put the book down because you need to know what happens next. Miss Marple's methods of deduction fit in perfectly with the mood of this novel, and she winds up giving the Chief-Inspector a hand in solving the case, naturally, although the inspector is just as sharp-eyed as Miss Marple. The conclusion is both rushed and unhurried, and the story is left with a delightful air of uncertainty at the very end.

In a nod to the lifestyle in her earlier books, Miss Marple takes at a vacation at a hotel that perfectly reproduces pre-war life. Too good to be true? Even in her old age, Miss Marple is caught in a mystery.

Perhaps not the strongest Miss Marple, but with many of the elements that made her a great character. It is interesting how much the focus on her age creates an air of melancholy around the book. Miss Marple becomes a pre-war artifact in her own right. I suspect that this aspect alone would make this book particularly interesting for people interested in Christie biographic material.

In the midst of a crime wave involving a host of startling robberies, elderly Jane Marple takes a vacation at London's Bertram's Hotel--a hotel that specializes in recreating the luxuries of the bygone Edwardian age, complete with high tea, cozy armchairs by the fire, and world-class service. But when a young heiress staying at the hotel becomes involved with an undesirable man and the absent-minded Canon Pennyfeather mysteriously disappears from his rooms, Miss Marple quickly realizes that the hotel's famous service may include more than meets the eye.

Although Christie's novel successfully evokes the delicious pleasures of the hotel, the plot of AT BERTRAM'S HOTEL hinges on a series of unlikely coincidences and becomes increasingly transparent as the novel progresses. The mastermind behind the current crime wave is extremely obvious--and when the murder at last arrives, quite late in the novel, the killer is more obvious still. This is not one of the writer's better novels, and newcomers to Agatha Christie's works will likely be disappointed; recommended to hardcore fans only.

This book was an uncharacteristic A.C. in that it contained many sub plots, sub plots that distracted and confused me at times(Although I knew that all of these plots somehow shared a common denominator of the main plot).

What I found to be particularly peculiar was that there wasn't a single murder until over a third of the book was read!

Also, the ending, having the signature twist, was a bit predictable. I, of course, wouldn't have figured it out to the very last detail, but it wasn't by a far stretch of the imagination, either. That's a first for me w/ an A.C. book.

The chief inspector came to the solution, but I was still left scatching my head as to HOW he figured it out. It wasn't thorough enough of an explanation for me.

Overall, this wasn't the best A.C. featuring Miss Marple. As one reviewer pointed out, Miss Marple was instrumental in the investigation, but she wasn't the anchor in solving the crime, although the chief inspector leaned on her at times for help.

I would strongly discourage you, a would be 1st time A.C. reader, in picking up this book. Read some of the other classics of A.C. before reading this. Ones w/ one-dimensional and faster plots,confined settings(And Then There Were None is an excellent start). You'll quickly become a fan and will be able to still appreciate a declining A.C. book like ABH if you do.

Agatha Christie had a tendency, throughout her distinguished writing career, to inject international intrigue into her mysteries, ergo, the Tommy and Tuppence entries. This one also captures that sweeping idea, only it features Miss Marple instead.

The scene of the crime, for the most part, is at Bertram's Hotel, which features perfect, old-time, nostalgic lodging, primarily for aristocratic Brits and for American tourists who are drooling to savour the stereotypical English "experience". But one swarthy and infamous race-car driver does fracture the pristine ambiance of the hotel's lobby with his prickly presence when he apparently shows up to visit his beau, a well-known adventuress who is lodged there.

A man is killed (shot), literally on the Hotel steps and sub-plots of thefts and robberies all around England prevail contemporaneously. An absent-minded cleric also goes missing. Of course, Miss Marple teams up with the local Police Chief Inspector to crack these incongruous cases.

If the work has a flaw, it's the implausibility of the action, leaning toward that of what one might experience while viewing a James Bond film, only not quite so high-tech. Overall, though, I enjoyed the book, albeit I confess to being a huge fan of Christie.

Not Christie's best but pretty good.