A Murder is Announced (1950) by Agatha Christie

Some years ago, while reviewing Agatha Christie's The Murder at the Vicarage (1930), I claimed the biggest difference between the Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple series is that the latter never produced a genre classic or even a great detective novel – like Murder on the Orient Express (1934), The ABC Murders (1936) and Death on the Nile (1937). Even some of Christie's standalones, like And Then There Were None (1939) and Towards Zero (1944), rank higher than the best Miss Marple novels. The comment section had one answer to that: A Murder is Announced (1950). So decided then to give it a reread one of these days to see if it can stand spine to spine with Christie's best Poirot and standalone mysteries.A Murder is Announced opens on the morning when the inhabitants of the village of Chipping Cleghorn get their morning papers. Their local Chipping Cleghorn Gazette has an eyebrow raising ad: "a murder is announced and will take place on Friday, October 29th, at Little Paddocks at 6:30…