(Note: this post contains spoilers for a late-period Agatha Christie novel. I only discuss whodunnit below the cut, but above the cut I do discuss some other story elements and the mechanics of how Christie resolves, or rather fails to resolve, a major storyline. You have been warned.)

I recently read the late-period Agatha Christie novel At Bertram’s Hotel for the first time, and I was probably in the best possible frame of mind for it. I’d read up on Brown’s Hotel (reputed to be a favorite of Christie’s, although supposedly NOT the hotel Bertram’s is based on) a while back, so I knew a little bit about this style of aggressively English, aggressively Edwardian midcentury hotel. More recently, I’d read up on the Great Train Robbery of 1963, a pretty obvious inspiration for one of the book’s events. Terence Stamp had just passed away, and the obits informed me that he would have been playing the lead in Alfie onstage around the time Bertram’s Hotel had been written. That in turn gave me some idea of what Christie might have had in mind when she described race-car driver Ladislaus Malinowski and his “cruel, handsome, hawklike face.”

(Normally when I see those last four words together, I’m imagining Basil Rathbone or one of a couple of similar actors, who were not at all suitable for leather jackets, hot rods, and Malinowski’s other accoutrements. Or, I’m imagining this guy, who was American, and due to the vagaries of his career would not have been on Christie’s radar in 1964-1965. And regardless of who I’m imagining, they’re people somewhere in their forties or late thirties at best; not the kind of young, reckless chick magnet Christie had in mind.)

Anyway, I liked At Bertram’s Hotel reasonably well, although a lot of it felt like it needed a weirder, more surreal touch. Maybe it should not have been written by Agatha Christie, but by Margery Allingham around the time of Tiger in the Smoke. I did not like the ending, because it’s neither “justice done,” nor “justice tragically withheld by the sad facts of life.” Miss Marple debunks the last red herring in the murder subplot and supplies the true solution. Then she and Main Police Guy make a somewhat gormless and unsuccessful attempt to rattle the real murderer, and then Main Police Guy, after being prodded by Miss Marple, resolves that he will catch that confusticated murderer yet! The. End. It was infuriating, partly because I could see which Shady Character, already established in the plot, could be used for leverage against the murderer. Another few thousand words would have wrapped up the story reasonably well.

But, it’s a Miss Marple novel, which means that I didn’t care enough to sit down and write my own ending, so I enlisted Claude.ai’s help. After a few arguments with Claude (who kept trying to give Shady Leverage Character a more active role in the murder and its aftermath than I think the character actually had) I got something I could tweak to my own satisfaction. I made a few deletions, minor rewrites and reshufflings to establish Shady Leverage Character’s true role (or lack thereof) in the proceedings, and I gave Miss Marple a parting speech that wasn’t great but at least tied in with themes and concerns she’d raised earlier in the novel. Even better, Anthropic didn’t throttle my account this time. I’m not going to post the end result here, because what would be the point? It’s not Christie grade. It’s not (for the most part) written by me, and it’s tailored to my ideas of what I think At Bertram’s Hotel needs by way of resolution, which may or may not work for anyone else. I don’t think AI is terribly likely to put actual working writers out of a job, but this is the kind of thing it’s good at: scratching specific fannish itches for weird little things the end-user wants to read, but can’t or won’t write for themselves.

My original prompt, which contains MANY SPOILERS, is after the designated spoiler space, below the cut. If you want to use it to roll your own ending to At Bertram’s Hotel, you may want to adjust the second part of the prompt (after the words “in Agatha Christie’s style”) to reflect your own vision of what happens.

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The following is not intended for commercial purposes, only fanfic. The Agatha Christie novel “At Bertram’s Hotel” ends with Chief Inspector Davy and Miss Marple confronting Bess Sedgwick, a colorful public figure, about her crimes. Bess confesses to leading a gang of very successful robbers, and also to killing her first husband, Michael Gorman. She claims she did so because he was blackmailing her about the fact that the two of them had never divorced and Bess had committed bigamy by marrying other men. She then escapes, and commits suicide by wrecking her car. Miss Marple then makes the case that Elvira Blake, Bess’s daughter by her second husband, actually killed Gorman, because she was afraid that her mother’s bigamy would somehow deprive Elvira of the money she would inherit at age twenty-one from her father’s estate. The main reason Elvira wants the money is to induce the daring race car driver Ladislaus Malinowski, to marry her. Malinowski is also part of Bess’s gang of robbers. In a brief meeting with Elvira, Davy and Miss Marple try to get her to confess, but are unable to shake her. The last sentences of the novel involve Davy resolving to catch the unrepentant murderess Elvira. Write an additional chapter, in Agatha Christie’s style, in which Elvira breaks down because Miss Marple hints to her that Malinowski has told the police that she murdered Gorman, in exchange for a reduced sentence for his part in the robberies. Elvira attacks Miss Marple, and the concealed Chief Inspector Davy steps in to arrest Elvira. This could possibly be staged in one of the writing rooms at Bertram’s hotel, which has very high-back armchairs set with their backs to the windows and the writing desks in front of the windows, so that it is not easy to someone who goes into the room and over to the writing desks to see whether the armchairs are occupied or not.