(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.

Continue reading “At Bertram’s Hotel: Review plus More AI Fanficcing” →