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"Inside, if this was the first time you had visited Bertram's, you felt, almost with alarm, that you had reentered a vanished world. Time had gone back. You were in Edwardian England once more."
-At Bertram's Hotel, p. 2
The Sum of It:
I'm back with Miss Marple this weekend - and it's been such a treat! Miss Marple's niece, Joan (married to the regularly-referenced nephew Raymond West), wants to give Auntie Jane a bit of a vacay. Joan asks Jane where she would like to go, and Miss Marple answers straight away: SEND ME TO BERTRAM'S! Apparently Miss Marple visited this classy establishment as a teenager and half wants to relive the good old days and half is just plain curious if it's still as great as she remembers.
So off she goes to Bertram's, where the staff keeps the old fashioned lights burning bright by offering traditional English delicacies such as seed cake and REAL muffins (there is a great deal of truly delightful talk about the distinctions between American and English muffins), maids with caps, and a host of old timers to give the place character. Miss Marple happily runs into old pal Lady Selina Hazy and the two are happy to sit and eat the top notch seed cake and have a good gossip. And there's plenty to gossip about, especially when the uber-famous Lady Bess Sedgwick saunters in one day. Lady Bess has an astounding history of every kind of adventure, from being in the French resistance to saving children from burning houses to having a race car driving boy toy.
Lady Selina and Miss Marple's gossip is further fueled by the appearance at Bertram's of Lady Bess's estranged daughter, Elvira, and the bombshell that Bess and Elvira maybe both have it going on with aforementioned racing driver, Ladislaus Malinowski #drama. Elvira runs around morbidly talking about what happens to her money when she dies, Bess discovers her first husband is working at the hotel, and the Bertram residents are further shocked when said ex-husband is shot as he attempted to shield Elvira from a would-be killer! Add to the mix a string of robberies and a befuddled Canon Pennyfather who may or may not be involved in them and Bertram's has quite the mystery to solve!
The YOA Treatment:
At Bertram's Hotel is by no means Dame Agatha's most fantastic novel (something we have been running into a lot recently...), however, its immense charm comes from Agatha's attention to detail and setting the scene of a location you can genuinely believe Miss Marple would want to revisit. Agatha spends a great deal of time describing the hotel's staff, fantastic tea spread, accommodation of American and English visitors, and attentive staff. Even the chair options at Bertram's get a shoutout:
"There was a general appearance of rich red velvet and plushy cosiness. The armchairs were not of this time and age. They were well above the level of the floor, so that rheumatic old ladies had not to struggle in an undignified manner in order to get to their feet."
After reading this book, more than anything I was dying to stay at a real life Bertram's. Apparently, Agatha is thought to have based Bertram's on Brown's Hotel in London (somewhere she regularly visited). This makes sense because you can feel Agatha writing from her own experience in Bertram's.
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-A.
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