The shadow hand

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The shadow hand (original title The Moving Finger ) is the 33rd detective novel by Agatha Christie . It was first published in the spring of 1942 as a serial novel and in the same year as a book in the USA, and only in June 1943 as a book in the United Kingdom . The British and American editions differ considerably. A German translation was first published in 1944 by the Schweizer Scherz Verlag , translated by Anna Katharina Rehmann . In 1999 the novel was translated again by Sabine Roth.

It determines Miss Marple in her third novel.

Novel title

The English title comes from the 71st verse of The Rubaiyats by ʿOmar Chayyām in the translation by Edward FitzGerald :

The moving finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.

(The finger moves and he writes; and, once he has written, he goes away: Neither all your piety nor your spirit will lure him back to erase even half the line, nor will your tears wash away a word of it.)

This quatrain was very popular and well known in the English-speaking world. It refers to the biblical warning message in the book of Daniel .

action

Jerry Burton is seriously injured in a plane crash. His doctor recommends that he take a rest in the country. Jerry and his sister Joanna Burton rent a country house in the small English town of Lymstock. Soon they receive an obscene anonymous letter and learn that such anonymous letters have been circulating in the town for some time.

Mona Symmington, the wife of the local attorney, is found dead. Next to her corpse one discovers an anonymous letter to her with the allegation that one of her children came from an illegitimate relationship, a glass with remnants of potassium cyanide and a scrap of paper with the words: “I can't go any more” (“I can't go on “) in her handwriting. The saying the "inquest", which is the usual in England judicial inquest , is suicide in a state of temporary insanity, and the police investigation focused on the writer of the anonymous letters.

Then the Burtons 'housekeeper, Partridge, receives a call from the Symmingtons' maid, Agnes, for advice because something seems strange to her. Both agree to meet for tea the next day, but Agnes does not appear. Instead, Megan Hunter, Mona Symmington's 20-year-old daughter from her first marriage, finds her body in a closet. Scotland Yard is investigating the matter and it is concluded that the anonymous letters were written by an educated middle-aged woman and that the writer also committed Agnes' murder because Agnes knew something about her. Because the investigation is progressing too slowly, Mrs. Dane Calthrop, the pastor's wife, announces that she will hire her own expert, who later turns out to be Miss Marple.

Parallel to these events, two love stories develop: Jerry Burton falls in love with Megan Hunter, Joanna Burton with Owen Griffith, the local doctor, whose feelings she initially only wanted to play with. Two dramatic events cause the love stories to enter an acute phase: Jerry Burton spontaneously pulls Megan Hunter onto the train to London and has her dressed there because he is annoyed by her sloppy clothes; Joanna Burton unexpectedly meets Owen Griffith while out walking and is forced by him to assist with a difficult delivery.

The police set a trap by monitoring the home of the Women's Institute , which is where the typewriter used to write on the envelopes of the anonymous letters is located. She watches Aimée Griffith, the doctor's sister, write another anonymous letter to the Symmingtons nanny, Elsie Holland. Griffith is arrested. But Miss Marple is not satisfied. She sets her own trap and informs the police about it. At her instigation, Megan comes into Symmington's office and blackmails him with the fact that she knows that he committed the murders. He pays her the required amount. The night she sleeps, he tries to murder her by drugging her and then placing her in front of the gas stove . He is arrested.

At a meeting in the parsonage, Miss Marple is introduced as the expert commissioned by Mrs. Dane Calthrop and gives her final verdict on the motives and course of the crime. Symmington had killed his wife in order to marry the pretty nanny. The anonymous letters came from Symmington, who had only established the "poison pen" to make the murder appear as a suicide. He also committed Agnes' murder because he overheard her conversation with Partridge. Aimée Griffith had only written the last letter to disgust Elsie Holland from the house and to be able to marry Symmington herself.

Both of the Burtons' love stories end in happy ending. They settle in Lymstock with their respective partners.

Narrative style, formal structure, place and time

It is a first- person story by a male narrator, namely by Jerry Burton. In the British edition, it comprises 15 chapters, numbered in Arabic, usually divided into two to four sub-chapters, each denoted by Roman numerals. The told period is about six weeks.

The story begins in London and returns there occasionally, but mostly takes place in the fictional small town of Lymstock. There are only vague indications of the localization of this place: it can be reached relatively quickly by train or car from London, the characters in the novel are able to go to London in the morning and return in the evening. The mention of a bog on the outskirts and a gate nearby reminds one of Christie's homeland Devon , which is relatively far from London. In contrast, Lymstock itself is described in detail. The narrator goes into his great story, which of course was practically demolished in the 18th century because progress left the place by the wayside. Lymstock appears on the one hand as a deeply provincial, typically English small town that is captured in the novel in ever new metaphors: as still backwater ("quiet backwater") or, in the words of the fictional character Mr. Pye, 50 years behind the present or like under a glass cover. On the other hand, it has some contemporary achievements, not only the fast train connection to London, but also, for example, a store of the "International Stores" chain on the High Street. To Hans Reimann the place appeared like an English crow's corner .

The story takes place around the time in which it was written, i.e. in the late 1930s or early 1940s, which is indicated by numerous allusions. Of course, there is no evidence of the Second World War in the plot , air strikes, rationing and the like do not occur. The narrator's plane crash, which made the recreational stay in Lymstock necessary in the first place, is not described in detail and is not linked to a war event. War only plays a role in the narrator's daydream, but the First World War . The weeks of the narrated time are set in a vaguely indicated but sunny spring .

The book contains a dedication to the Assyriologist Sidney Smith, who was then working at the British Museum , and his wife Mary. Sidney Smith was a friend of Christie and her husband Max Mallowan .

genre

The shadow hand connects two different genres: the detective story and the romance novel . The classic patterns of the detective story appear in varied forms: The detective, Miss Marple, appears very late in the novel and has very few scenes of her own. She receives all the essential information for the solution from her most important helper, Jerry Burton, who, like Dr. Watson at Sherlock Holmes , who tells the story itself - unlike Dr. Watson, however, is unaware of the narrator's identity. It only becomes known to him in the classic dissolution scene in which Miss Marple presents the solution by the fireplace in the rectory.

The reader receives the same clues from Burton as Miss Marple, so fair play is suggested: He could come up with the solution just like Marple, but to do this he has to eliminate the misleading and false contextualizations that are suggested to the narrator. One of the most important clues is a Jerry Burton daydream that he reports to Miss Marple. There he associated with saying no smoke without fire ( "No smoke without fire"), which he keeps hearing in Lymstock in connection with the anonymous letters, the curtain of smoke ( "smoke screen") from the war. Above all, however, the speech about the “scrap of paper” on which Mrs. Symmington's parting words were written reminds him of Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg's declaration that England wanted a “scrap of paper” (namely the one from German Reich guaranteed neutrality of Belgium ) wage war. Miss Marple later interprets the associations: suicides usually did not write their suicide notes on scraps of paper, Burton subconsciously noticed this; He also subconsciously connected the anonymous letters with a smoke curtain that camouflaged what was actually going on. In fact, the scrap of paper came from an everyday message and had only been torn up and kept by Symmington so that it could be used as a farewell note.

The double love story of the Burton siblings is initially largely unrelated to the criminal act. Jerry Burton's and Megan Hunter's romance has features of a Cinderella storyline, but even more features of a variation on the Pygmalion motif. Twenty-year-old and therefore not yet of legal age, Megan feels like the fifth wheel on the car in her stepfather's household, receives little care there and walks around dressed carelessly. Jerry Burton, of indefinite age, not only grasps an inclination for them, but feels the need to expand their education. His spontaneous decision to take Megan with him to London and have her completely new clothes and hair done leads to the fact that she takes on a new, also outwardly attractive character. Only after this self-made transformation does he become aware of his love for Megan. The literary scholar Gill Plain has interpreted this trait as an attempt to restore male dominance, which had got into trouble due to the events of the war (symbolized by Jerry's invalidity at the beginning of the novel): “Jerry regains his male agency through the godlike creation of a woman . "

Next to this primary love story is the secondary one between Joanna Burton and Owen Griffith, which is initially designed as "play fast and loose": Joanna plays with the doctor's feelings out of hurt vanity. However, Owen Griffith also succeeds in regaining his masculine capacity to act: He forces Joanna, who happens to meet the doctor dealing with a difficult childbirth while walking, to do ancillary work in his medical work, and the game becomes serious, a real love story.

Only at the end is there a direct link between the crime novel and love story: Megan Hunter is chosen by Miss Marple to set a trap for the criminal. When she awakes from her unconsciousness after the Symmington assassination attempt, she revises her original rejection of Burton's proposal. The introductory text of the first edition as a serialized novel depicts the connection of the plot as follows: "A love story, promoted by malice, overshadowed by murder and haunted by a crime novel", thus emphasizes the romance as the core plot.

characters

The novel is essentially set in good company in the small town of Lymstock. The main characters here are Little Furze's landlady, Emily Barton, an old maid who lives on her investments; the local doctor, Owen Griffith, with his sister Aimée Griffith; the lawyer Richard Symmington with his wife Mona and their two sons and Mona's daughter from first marriage, Megan Hunter; the pastor Caleb Dane Calthrop with his wife Maud; the privateer and collector Pye. Then there are the two Londoners Jerry and Joanna Burton, who have wealth and who move naturally in these circles. These people make house calls to each other, play bridge together, and meet on the high street while shopping.

The working women move around these figures, especially the Symmingtons nanny, Elsie Holland, and the Symmington secretary, Miss Ginch. The house staff can be placed one step below: Miss Partridge, Emily Barton's former housekeeper, who now takes care of the Burtons' household; Florence taking care of Emily Barton's household; Agnes Woddell, the Symmingtons' maid, and Rose, the cook in this household; Beatrice Baker, cleaning assistant for the Burtons, with her mother. In addition to this group of people, only one person from the small town itself plays a significant role, namely Mrs Cleat, the “local witch”.

Then there are the investigative staff: Superintendent Nash, who is investigating the case, and Inspector Graves, a London specialist in investigating anonymous letters. Jane Marple, who is initially introduced as a visit from Dane Calthrops, only turns out to be an investigator in the final scene.

The class and gender structure of this ensemble of characters gains importance through the plot of the detective novel. At first, the narrator assumes that the letters come from an uneducated peasant woman, and Mrs. Baker reports that Mrs. Cleat is generally suspected in the locality. But the expert Nash, who was summoned after Mrs. Symmington's death, comes to the conclusion that the perpetrator must be an educated woman. This greatly narrows the number of suspects, as is necessary for the classic detective story. In conversations, especially between Jerry and Joanna Burton, one learns that only the female half of the small upper class of the small town is now considered suspect. This includes not only the women of good society, but also the educated working women and especially Mr. Pye, who is described with numerous attributes as a feminine man. The attributes suggest he is homosexual, although not explicitly named.

Since the anonymous letters, as Miss Marple points out at the end, were merely a diversionary maneuver for the perpetrator, the real perpetrator lies outside this circle because of his clearly male gender role. This creates the surprise effect typical of detective novels. The reader also learns early on that, as both Nash and Owen Griffith note, the letters are very similar to two earlier cases of anonymous letter-writing that actually went back to women. Symmington had made use of this fund. With these tips, Christie also tries to meet the requirements of fair play : The readers should receive relevant information that would in principle enable them to solve the case without additional knowledge.

Origin and publication history

In Agatha Christie's notebooks, the idea of ​​the “moving finger” was first mentioned around 1940 (not precisely dated). The idea of ​​anonymous letters was already formulated in the first collection of ideas and Jane Marple was intended as a detective from the start. In 1941 Christie set to work, with the basic lines of the plot established early, but in particular the order of the events being rearranged considerably.

As early as March 1941, Christie's literary agent Edmund Cork was able to write to his American partner Harold Ober: “The next Christie novel will be a very sweet anonymous letter tragedy with Miss Marple.” The creation process went relatively smoothly. Although rejected the prestigious American magazine Saturday Evening Post , which already has several Christie thrillers as serial novels had not printed and it pays well, this novel down because he needed too long to really get going, and thus for the continuation Genre be suitable; but Collier’s accepted him. Apparently, however, Collier’s also bothered about the introductory chapters, because especially in the first parts the story appeared in the magazine with clear cuts. The print took up eight episodes and was provided with illustrations by Mario Cooper , who mainly focused on the female main character Megan Hunter (she shows five of eight cover illustrations).

Christie's original title was The Tangled Web (something like: "Entangled in the Web"), but Cork pointed out that this was too much like a competing product, The Spider's Web . Thereupon Christie proposed The Moving Finger and thus prevailed against Cork's alternative proposal Misdirection (for example: "distraction", "misdirection").

The American book edition was also published by Dodd, Mead and Company in 1942 . It wasn't until a year later that the book was published by Collins in Great Britain . The American edition was probably created on the basis of Collier’s shortened version. It is significantly shorter than the British edition, some minor characters are missing, and references to them are sometimes ineffective. The significant differences between the British and American versions were not noticed until Penguin was preparing the British paperback edition in 1953. The Collins copy from Cork had been lost in the war, so he had given Penguin a copy of the American edition, but a series of letters drew Cork's attention to the discrepancies. The current German editions always refer to the text of the British edition.

The novel sold well, with 25,000 copies printed for the UK and Colonies practically sold out by the end of January 1945.

Translations

The novel has been translated into numerous languages: Bulgarian, Chinese, Danish, German, Estonian, Finnish, French, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Croatian, Lithuanian, Dutch, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Swedish, Slovak , Spanish, Czech and Hungarian, as well as Malayalam, the South Indian language . The title is reproduced quite differently. In German ( Die Schattenhand ) the association of the title quote with the menetekel is used. The French and Dutch translations ( La Plume Empoisonnée , De Giftige Pen ) pick out the phrase "poison pen" used several times in the novel for the letter writer. Finally, the Italian, Danish and Swedish translations refer to the illusion that the first murder is apparently a suicide triggered by mail ( Il terrore viene per la posta , Døden kommer med posten , Mord per korrespondens ).

The first German translation of the novel was published in 1944 by the Swiss Scherz Verlag and was made by Anna Katharina Rehmann , who had to earn money with her translation work to support her parents, Ottilie and Felix Salten , who had emigrated .

In the new translation by Sabine Roth (1999), a footnote, an unusual means in a detective novel, points to the connection between the “scrap of paper” and Bethmann Hollweg's saying that today's German readers may “seem strange”. The saying went into the "English treasure trove of quotations" and was therefore present to the English readers. Two proper names have also been changed: the cottage rented by the Burtons is called Little Moor instead of Little Furze ("Little Gorse House ") , and the murdered housemaid Agnes Woddell is renamed Minnie Morse . The latter is done in order to save the joke that comes about through a misunderstanding of the narrator: He understands the phone "Agnes Wattle" and will have the means to resist excited temptation by the last name, the same time "waddle," as Donald Duck to report . In the German version, this misunderstanding is generated by the similar sound of "Minnie Morse" to Minnie Mouse .

expenditure

  • Moving fingers . Illustrated by Mario Cooper . In: Collier’s . Eight sequels: March 28, 1942, pp. 11-12, 63-68; April 4, 1942, pp. 16, 44-49; April 11, 1942, pp. 20, 43-46; April 18, 1942, pp. 17, 26-32; April 25, 1942, pp. 19, 55-58; May 2, 1942, pp. 24-31; May 9, 1942, pp. 54-61; May 16, 1942, pp. 23, 68-72.
  • The Moving Finger . Dodd, Mead and Company, New York 1942.
  • The Moving Finger . Collins, London 1943.
    • The shadow hand. Translated by Anna Katharina Rehmann. Scherz, Bern 1944.
    • The shadow hand. Translated by Sabine Roth. Hoax. Bern 1999.

Audio books

  • 2005 Die Schattenhand (5 CDs): unabridged reading; Speaker: Ursula Illert. Director: Hans Eckardt. Translation by Sabine Roth; Publishing house and studio for audio book productions (Marburg / Lahn)
  • 2010 Die Schattenhand (3 CDs): abridged reading; Speaker: Edmund Telgenkämper ; The Hörverlag (Munich)

Film adaptations

  • The Moving Finger was first filmed by the BBC with Joan Hickson for the television series Miss Marple and aired on February 21 and 22, 1985.
  • A second film adaptation was made in 2006 with Geraldine McEwan as Miss Marple for the television series Agatha Christie's Marple . It was first broadcast on February 12, 2006 in the United Kingdom.

Others

In her autobiography, Christie describes this book as one of her best: “Another book that I'm really happy with. is The Moving Finger . Rereading what you wrote seventeen or eighteen years ago is a good test. Some views change. Some do not stand the test of time, some do. "

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ German first edition in the catalog of the German National Library
  2. ^ New translation in 1999 in the catalog of the German National Library
  3. In the Women's Institutes, there were regular community activities by women, in particular courses in household activities (cooking) and other training courses (typing, shorthand). In Great Britain their emergence was linked to the First World War, here women should and wanted to contribute to food production in times of war. See the website of the still-existing Women's Institutes, https://www.thewi.org.uk/ .
  4. James Zemboy: The Moving Finger (1942). In: ders .: The Detective Novels of Agatha Christie. A reader's guide. McFarland, Jefferson 2008, pp. 200-204, here: p. 200.
  5. See, for example, Rebecca Mills: England's Pockets. Objects of Anxiety in Christie's Post-War Novels. In: JC Bernthal: The Ageless Agatha Christie. Essays on the Mysteries and the Legacy . McFarland, Jefferson 2016, pp. 29–44, here: p. 31.
  6. Hans Reimann: Lite raid , Volume 1 (1951), S. 178th
  7. See for example Patricia Maida, Nicolas B. Spornick: Murder she wrote . Bowling Green 1982, p. 112; similar to Rebecca Mills: England's Pockets. Objects of Anxiety in Christie's Post-War Novels. In: JC Bernthal: The Ageless Agatha Christie. Essays on the Mysteries and the Legacy . McFarland, Jefferson 2016, pp. 29–44, here: p. 33.
  8. See, for example, Rebecca Mills: England's Pockets. Objects of Anxiety in Christie's Post-War Novels. In: JC Bernthal (ed.): The Ageless Agatha Christie. Essays on the Mysteries and the Legacy . McFarland, Jefferson (NC) 2016, pp. 29–44, here: p. 33.
  9. Hans Reimann: Lite raid , Volume 1 (1951), S. 178th
  10. Gill Plain: Literature of the 1940s. War, Postwar and 'Peace'. Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh 2013, p. 140. In the original English: "Jerry restores his masculine agency through the god-like creation of woman."
  11. Gill Plain: Literature of the 1940s. War, Postwar and 'Peace'. Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh 2013, p. 140.
  12. Collier’s , March 28, 1942, p. 11. "Beginning the story of a romance fostered by malice, shadowed by murder, and haunted by mystery."
  13. ^ John Curran: Agatha Christie's Secret Notebooks. Fifty Years of Mystery in the Making . Harper Collins, London 2009, pp. 382-385.
  14. Janet Morgan: Agatha Christie. A biography. Knopf, New York 1984, p. 232.
  15. Christie may have made the cuts himself at Collier’s request ; such a procedure is documented for The Hollow a few years later, see Janet Morgan: Agatha Christie. A biography. Knopf, New York 1984, p. 254.
  16. See the corresponding numbers of the magazine, which are fully available on the Internet, beginning March 28, 1942 .
  17. Janet Morgan: Agatha Christie. A biography. Knopf, New York 1984, p. 232.
  18. ^ John Curran: Agatha Christie's Secret Notebooks. Fifty Years of Mystery in the Making . Harper Collins, London 2009, p. 381.
  19. Janet Morgan: Agatha Christie. A biography. Knopf, New York 1984, p. 252.
  20. According to the UNESCO Translationum Index, see http://www.unesco.org/xtrans/bsresult.aspx?lg=0&a=Christie,%20Agatha&stxt=moving%20finger .
  21. Susanne Blume Berger: Rehmann-Salten . In: Ilse Korotin (Ed.): BiografiA. Lexicon of Austrian Women . Volume 3: PZ ( online on the Böhlau-Verlag website). Böhlau, Berlin / Cologne / Weimar 2016, pp. 2667–2668.
  22. Agatha Christie: The Shadow Hand. A case for Miss Marple . Translated from the English by Sabine Roth. Atlantik, Hamburg 2015 (first Scherz, Bern / Munich / Vienna 1999), p. 131f.
  23. Audiobook (complete) in the catalog of the German National Library
  24. Agatha Christie: An Autobiography , Collins, 1977, p. 520. ISBN 0-00-216012-9