I strongly suspect that future scholars of the simon-pure detective novel will hold that its greatest practitioner, out-ranking even Ellery Queen and John Dickson Carr in their best periods, has been Agatha Christie—not only for her incomparable plot construction, but for her extraordinary ability to limn character and era with so few (and such skilled) strokes. And while Queen and Carr have offered recent books well below their highest standards, Christie … is virtually as good as ever—as she roundly demonstrates in "At Bertram's Hotel."…

Miss Jane Marple revisits a quietly superlative London hotel which she had known as a girl, and finds it still a marvel of Edwardian elegance and conservatism—with a disturbing off-color touch of something new, and definitely of the sixties. The puzzle of the tone of Bertram's Hotel is the primary puzzle of the novel (which runs most of its length without...