At Bertram’s Hotel: Review plus More AI Fanficcing

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(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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First Images From S&S 2026

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(Regarding the Austenian series of posts, it’s going to take some time for me to get the Elliots, Musgroves and Hayters straight in my head and write them up. In the meantime, here’s a followup on the latest Sense and Sensibility adaptation).

These are about a week old or a little more, and I was hoping to find some source other than a reddit thread, but I didn’t, so here we are. I’d been a little anxious about costume designer Grace Snell, who didn’t seem to have much in the way of period work, but I like the clothes so far, which look solidly Regency (don’t ask me to match them to a particular year) and have some cool details in terms of embroidery and lace. Wealthy Mrs. Jennings (Fiona Shaw) wears flamboyant green and gold. Elinor (Daisy Edgar-Jones) and Marianne (Esme Creed-Miles) wear shades of gray/black and purple/lavender, with Elinor being the more somberly dressed of the two. I’ve seen conflicting claims about whether these were in fact “half-mourning” colors as far back as the Regency, or whether they were more of a Victorian thing, but it’s a useful visual shorthand for “our dad has been dead between six and nine months,” and it looks good on them.

A couple pictures include Ceara Coveney (Elayne in Wheel of Time, one of the brighter points of Season Two and Three), wearing a very pretty light gray outfit. Possibly our Lucy Steele? One shot has a very tall, well-dressed man in the background with a slight receding chin. He might or might not be Herbert Nordrum as Colonel Brandon. If so, cause for rejoicing, dude does have enough neck for Regency collars! The group shot of Mrs. Jennings with the Dashwood sisters also has a couple of men in the background, although it’s not really clear who they are.

All in all, good job so far. My main beef with what I’ve seen of the Netflix Pride and Prejudice costumes is that they don’t really feel like a unified aesthetic, just “here’s a bunch of clothes from about the right period, with some effort to distinguish between characters who care about their looks and those who don’t. Hope you like them!” These S&S clothes do feel like there’s more of a coherent idea behind them, if that makes sense. Unlike the P&P first look, these seem to be informal behind-the-scenes shots that aren’t meant to give a sense of the production’s cinematography. As a result, I don’t know if the final film will be as gray-toned as these images suggest. On the one hand, S&S lends itself more to that kind of somberness than P&P. On the other hand, the last BBC S&S, which is admittedly 17 or 18 years old at this point, did something similar. We shall see.

State of the Dictator, 2025

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When I was talking to another writer on Discord, I realized that I tend to be somewhat vague and off-handed when I talk about my writing process, and assume people already know what I’m talking about, so I’m going to walk through the whole process here for transparency’s sake. This process includes the use of AI software for transcription and cleanup of dictated content, but it doesn’t start or end there, so if you are interested in that part, please, bear with me until I get there.

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Austenian: Harriet Smith and the Case of the Missing Parents

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Let’s get the book’s official statement on the subject out of the way first. Late in the novel, Harriet’s father is stated to be a tradesman, marital status unknown, who is “rich enough to afford her the comfortable maintenance which had ever been hers, and decent enough to have always wished for concealment.” Her father approves of the match with Robert Martin, and there’s a suggestion he possibly settles money on Harriet on her marriage. Nothing is said of the mother. I personally do not think Harriet is related to anyone we meet in the book. No named character in the book is high enough in status to weather the scandal of being known to have fathered or given birth to an illegitimate child. This doesn’t mean that they wouldn’t have done it, just that they wouldn’t have kept the child, and the accompanying risk of gossip and scandal, in the neighborhood of Highbury. However, the alternative theories are potentially of interest to people writing Jane Austen spinoffs, so let’s go over them. You’ll notice I don’t really address the question of whether particular character seem moral/immoral enough for certain behaviors; a lifetime of reading murder mysteries makes me unwilling to go that route in discussing what fictional people are capable of.

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Austenian: The Parents of Emma Woodhouse, and Their Friends, The Knightleys

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A quick Gutenberg skim on my part showed no days-of-week directly linked to days-of-month in the text, such as seen in P&P or Mansfield. Jo Modert, whose work I do not have direct access to, says that the main events of Emma seem to be mapped to an almanac for 1814-1815. Ellen Moody, after citing Modert, maps the novel instead to 1813-1814, for reasons that are not obvious to me. The only cultural reference known to point to anything earlier is Miss Bates getting confused about whether Ireland counts as a separate kingdom or not. Miss Bates is both ditzy and insular, so her continuing to get confused on this point long after it was a topical issue is plausible. Thus, this cultural reference doesn’t really wed Emma to a particular timeframe the way the soldiers billeted upon Meryton does with P&P. For once, I’m accepting Moody’s calendar without modifications. Mostly because I really don’t care that much about this novel, which weds considerable brilliance of technique, mood and psychology to two fairly unpleasant heroines, manipulative Emma Woodhouse and self-martyring Jane Fairfax. The only female characters in this one that I am at all fond of are Miss Bates and Harriet Smith.

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Austenian: The Parents of Mansfield Park, Part 2

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As previously indicated, I am interpreting the main body of Mansfield Park’s plot as happening in 1796-1797. However, the age indicators for most of the characters in this essay are very vague. Tom Bertram is apparently 25 during the main body of the plot, and I have randomly assumed that Henry Crawford is around that age, and that his sister Mary Crawford and their acquaintance John Yates are rather younger. 

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