Agatha Christie’s Marple

COPYRIGHT

HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

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Revised edition published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2019

Copyright © Anne Hart 1985

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Source ISBN: 9780008340285

Ebook Edition © May 2019 ISBN: 9780007396566

Version: 2019-04-06

DEDICATION

For a very dear aunt,

Anita Elliott Baird,

whom Miss Marple would have

enjoyed knowing

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Preface

1 St Mary Mead

2 Miss Marple’s Earlier Life

3 Miss Marple’s Career Begins

4 The 1930s

5 Postwar Events

6 The Four Last Cases

7 The Essential Miss Marple

8 A Visit to Miss Marple

9 Miss Marple at Home

10 Miss Marple at Large

11 ‘My Nephew, the Author’ and Other Relatives and Friends

12 Little Maids All In a Row

13 Miss Marple as Sleuth

A Miss Marple Bibliography

Miss Marple Short Stories

Miss Marple on Stage, Film, TV and Radio

Keep Reading

About the Author

Also by Anne Hart

About the Publisher

PREFACE

It has been a great pleasure to write this biography of Agatha Christie’s beloved and resilient Miss Marple, the best known of a notable group of women who have played leading roles in detective fiction. Of course, not a word of this book would have been written had not a benevolent genius created Miss Marple in the first place, and I am immensely grateful to Rosalind Hicks, Agatha Christie’s daughter, for giving her kind approval for my use of her mother’s writing in this way.

Unlike other biographers, I cannot claim to have unearthed new material. Everything we know of Miss Marple is contained in the twelve books and twenty short stories devoted to her remarkable sleuthing. To search through these books and stories, not for murderers but for clues to Miss Marple herself, is the aim of this biography. I hope its readers will enjoy reading it as much as I have enjoyed writing it. Together we are indebted to the incomparable Agatha Christie.

I am grateful to a number of people who have encouraged me along the way. I would particularly like to thank Susan Hart, Nancy Grenville, David Grenville, and Percy Janes for their helpful advice on the manuscript, and June Mescia, my editor, for her suggestions and good judgment.

ANNE HART

1 ST MARY MEAD

For me, as for many others, the reading of detective stories is an addiction like tobacco or alcohol … the story must conform to certain formulas (I find it very difficult, for example, to read one that is not set in rural England).

—W. H. Auden, ‘The Guilty Vicarage’

‘Give me a nice cup of tea, Aunt Jane, with some thin bread and butter and soothe me with your earliest remembrances of St Mary Mead.’

—Inspector Craddock, THE MIRROR CRACK’D FROM SIDE TO SIDE

The pretty village of St Mary Mead will be forever known as the home of Miss Jane Marple, that wonderful sleuth whose creator so cleverly, and for so many years, led us down the garden path. It is impossible, indeed, to imagine St Mary Mead without Miss Marple or Miss Marple without St Mary Mead; it was the archetypal English village created just for her. That for almost fifty years its pleasant homes and byways were so frequently the scenes of crimes has never detracted in the least from its essential cosiness and charm. Before fully introducing Miss Marple, it is first necessary to introduce St Mary Mead.

St Mary Mead lies in the home county of Downshire (occasionally called Radfordshire) and is about twenty-five miles south of London and twelve miles equidistant from Market Basing and the coast at Loomouth.* Danemouth, a fashionable watering place also on the coast, is about eighteen miles from the county town of Much Benham and it, in turn, is two miles from St Mary Mead.†

Of its history and the origins of its name we know nothing. It is true that a well-known archaeologist once came down to St Mary Mead to excavate an ancient barrow in the grounds of Old Hall, but the subsequent discovery that he was merely an impostor out to steal Colonel Protheroe’s Georgian trencher salts and Charles the Second tazza appears to have ended a brief flurry of interest in village antiquities. A concern for local history cannot be found listed as an activity in St Mary Mead; day-to-day affairs and distractions seem to have left its inhabitants with little time to greet tourists or dwell on any but the most recent events.

An interesting map of St Mary Mead is to be found in that useful early guide, The Murder at the Vicarage. A few additions – principally signposts to Gossington Hall and Much Benham, and an indication of the new Development – have been added to bring the geography of the village up to date. As can be seen from this map, St Mary Mead is a small village whose shops and houses straggle comfortably along the High Street from the Railway Station at one end to the Blue Boar at the other. Three houses, including the vicarage, face on to a side road, and in this area are several footpaths and lanes leading to and from the neighbouring woods and fields. Old Hall, one of the two ‘big houses’ of St Mary Mead, can be approached by one of these. The other big house, Gossington Hall, lies about a mile and a quarter along the Lansham Road to the northeast. To reach it one passes a new building estate boasting a flourish of half-timbered, sham Tudor houses rejoicing in ‘distorted rustic’ gates and names such as ‘Chatsworth’. This new building estate, laid out in the late 1920s, should not be confused with the more plebeian Development, whose many houses and television masts sprang up in the early 1960s, obliterating the pleasant meadows where Fanner Giles’s cows once used to graze.

Fortunately these newer areas are tucked well away from the High Street and out of view. If one drove through St Mary Mead today, it would present much the same aspect as it did forty or fifty years ago. It is regrettable, of course, that the fishmonger has chosen to install an unsightly plate-glass window, and the gleaming new supermarket, which replaced the basket shop, remains anathema to the older generation (‘All these great packets of breakfast cereal instead of cooking a child a proper breakfast of bacon and eggs’). Yet the old-world core, as Miss Marple liked to think of it, is still there – the church, the vicarage, and the ‘little nest of Queen Anne and Georgian houses’ where lived, in the good old days, that formidable triumvirate of village spinsters, Miss Marple, Miss Hartnell, and Miss Wetherby.

It is pleasant to imagine oneself back in those days. Where to begin? Perhaps 1935 could be arbitrarily chosen as a good year. Any number of unusual things had happened there in the preceding ten years and, to add to the interest, everyone still knew (almost) everyone else. As Miss Marple was to put it fifteen years later:

‘They were people whose fathers and mothers and grandfathers and grandmothers, or whose aunts or uncles, had lived there before them. If somebody new came to live there, they brought letters of introduction, or they’d been in the same regiment or served in the same ship as someone there already. If anybody new – really new – really a stranger – came, well they stuck out – everybody wondered about them and didn’t rest till they found out.’

The people who never rested in such inquiries were Miss Marple, Miss Hartnell, and Miss Wetherby,

the old guard of ladies in reduced circumstances who lived in neat houses round the church, and who knew intimately all the ramifications of the county families even though they might not be strictly county themselves.

Not everyone spoke of them so mildly: ‘old cats’ … ‘old pussies’ … ‘tea and scandal at four-thirty.’ Even Colonel Melchett, who was to become one of Miss Marple’s greatest admirers, was heard to exclaim, ‘Too many women in this part of the world.’

Miss Hartnell, who lived next door to Miss Marple, was described by the Vicar as ‘weather-beaten and jolly and much dreaded by the poor.’ Of Miss Wetherby, who lived next door to Miss Hartnell, he wrote that she ‘is a mixture of vinegar and gush.’ Earlier in the same paragraph he had described Miss Marple as ‘a white-haired old lady with a gentle, appealing manner’ and went on to conclude, ‘Of the two Miss Marple is much the more dangerous.’ In one sense he was right. Miss Marple was dangerous, but not as a scandalmonger, as the Vicar had first supposed.

Fortunately for St Mary Mead, Miss Marple emerged from the ranks of the ruling spinsters as a first-class detective, her wits and ingenuity well cultivated on the village grapevine. The mystery of Miss Wetherby’s missing gill of shrimps, the case of Miss Hartnell’s stolen opal pin, the affair of the Churchwarden’s separate establishment all prepared Miss Marple well for the wave of murders, attempted murders, robberies, and embezzlements that were to engulf St Mary Mead for the next forty years.

Apart from the censorious spinsters, did St Mary Mead have a ruling class? In the normal scheme of village life, of course, it was really supposed to be the landed gentry, the old county families who lived in the big houses. But Downshire could not claim to be a fashionable hunting county, and in the St Mary Mead of those pre-war days the owners of Old Hall and Gossington Hall tended to be relative newcomers – comfortably off, to be sure, but with attitudes and conduct not noticeably distinguishable from those of the village’s middle class.

At Gossington Hall, ‘Good, solidly built, rather ugly Victorian,’ lived the Bantrys, who were likeable and unpretentious. Colonel Bantry, bluff, ‘red-faced, broad-shouldered,’ was the principal magistrate of the district, read The Times, and defended the Empire. His wife, Dolly, who became one of Miss Marple’s closest friends, was a dear.

Old Hall was a big Victorian house surrounded by parkland and woods. These woods proved a particularly good place in which to set alibi-providing time fuses, bury incriminating evidence, and dig up rocks for Miss Marple’s Japanese garden. The deserted North Lodge of Old Hall had its uses as well. It was an excellent place from which to make anonymous phone calls.

Old Hall will always be remembered as the home of the odious Colonel Protheroe of The Murder at the Vicarage. In his day the front door of Old Hall was opened by a butler, while in the wings hovered a housekeeper, a parlourmaid, a cook, a kitchen maid, a valet, and a chauffeur. After Colonel Protheroe’s sudden demise Old Hall fell on hard times. Put up for sale, it proved unlettable and unsaleable until ‘an enterprising speculator had divided it into four flats with a central hot-water system, and the use of “the grounds” to be held in common by the tenants.’

At the crossroads, about midway between Old Hall and Gossington Hall, stood the parish church. ‘Our little church,’ the Vicar called it, and went on to add proudly that it had an interesting screen, ‘some rather fine old stained glass, and, indeed, the church itself is well worth looking at.’

Occasionally a handful of the inhabitants, usually newcomers, appear to have dabbled in faiths other than that of the Church of England: to have toyed with spiritualism, for example, or the Oxford Group (like young Ted Gerard, who owned up to embezzlement), or Wesleyanism (whose minister refused to let his child get her teeth fixed because it was the Lord’s Will if they stuck out). Generally speaking, however, most of the villagers were firmly, if not militantly, Church of England. As Miss Marple once put it, ‘in my own village, St Mary Mead, things do rather revolve round the church’; and indeed its parishioners, particularly the women, appear to have supported an impressive round of activities. There was the Women’s Institute, perpetually skirmishing with the District Nurse and the village schoolmistress, the WVS, and the Mothers’ Union; there was the Needlework Guild and the Sales of Work; there were the Boy Scouts, the Brownies, and the Girl Guides; there were the Choir Boys’ outings and the Boys’ Club cricket matches; there was the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, the St Giles Mission, and the Bishop’s Appeal for the Deep-Sea Fishermen; there was the St John Ambulance, the Nave Restoration Fund, and the Church of England Men’s Society; there were committees to look after unmarried mothers, the workhouse, and the orphanage. The list goes on and on.

Collecting moral and financial support for all these worthy causes was an important social activity in itself. Appropriate small black book in hand, one could knock at any door, distributing gossip with the annual Armistice Day poppies and receiving back what often proved to be valuable pieces of information. Miss Marple found this a particularly helpful method of investigation in some of her more difficult cases. Of course, in collecting, as in so many aspects of life in St Mary Mead, unfortunate episodes did occur. Not soon forgotten was ‘the woman who came down here and said she represented Welfare, and after taking subscriptions she was never heard of again,’ nor Mrs Partridge, who appropriated to her own use seventy-five pounds of Red Cross donations.

Presiding, uneasily at times, over these various parochial activities was the Vicar of St Mary Mead. Over the years a number of clerics occupied this post, the most memorable of whom was the Reverend Leonard Clement, one of the most likeable men in Marpelian literature and, as the narrator of The Murder at the Vicarage, an author in his own right. While his irrepressible wife Griselda and his parishioners regarded him as hopelessly absent-minded and unworldly, ‘a gentle, middle-aged man [who] was always the last to hear anything,’ his writings reveal an unexpectedly astute grasp of village affairs. ‘At my time of life,’ he wrote, ‘one knows that the worst is usually true.’ One cannot help but suspect that much of this gentle Vicar’s vagueness and detachment was a defence mechanism adopted against the vagaries of his flock. He had to endure the fluttering parish ladies who quarrelled over the church decorations and gave him bedsocks for Christmas; an organist who was ‘very peculiar indeed’ over young girls, succeeded by another who objected to the choirboys sucking sweets; a handsome young curate who proved embarrassingly attractive to the parish ladies, followed by another whose High Church ‘becking and nodding and crossing himself enraged the parishioners almost as much as his embezzlement of their Sunday Evensong offertories; the unpopular churchwarden who was found shot in the head in the Vicar’s own study. No one could say that St Mary Mead was an easy incumbency.

In his personal life, the Vicar appears to have wrestled constantly with temptation: his desire to read the latest detective novel, for example, instead of preparing next Sunday’s sermon; his continual longing for a decent meal; above all, his unseemly infatuation for his young wife, Griselda, who was indeed the antithesis of the traditional vicar’s wife. She claimed to have chosen her middle-aged husband over a ‘cabinet minister, a baronet, a rich company promoter, three subalterns, and a n’er-do-well with attractive manners’ and never to have regretted her decision: ‘It’s so much nicer to be a secret and delightful sin to anybody than to be a feather in his cap.’ As a housekeeper she was a disaster. ‘Bad food and lots of dust and dead wasps is really nothing to make a fuss about,’ she once said, and, it must be admitted, none of these things seems to have deterred either the spinster brigade or the tennis-party set from making Griselda’s untidy drawing room their rallying point.

Besides Miss Marple, the Clements had two other neighbours: Mrs Price Ridley and Dr Haydock. Mrs Price Ridley was a ‘rich and dictatorial widow’ whose immaculate house stood on the other side of the vicarage wall. Though not a spinster, she was an important member of the tea-and-scandal group and, to the Vicar’s secret regret, a devout churchgoer. On the other side of the Clements lived Dr Haydock, the physician and police surgeon. ‘Haydock is the best fellow I know,’ wrote the Vicar, and Colonel Melchett said of him, ‘He’s a very sound fellow in police work. If he says a thing, it’s so.’

From time to time strange birds of passage alighted in St Mary Mead, causing no end of a stir. Mention has been made of the bogus archaeologist who came to dig in the grounds of Old Hall. Other examples of this phenomenon were Mrs Spenlow, a lady with a past, who was found on her hearthrug, strangled by a tape measure, shortly after coming to live in St Mary Mead; Rex Stanford, an inoffensive young architect who was framed for a murder within a month of his arrival; and flamboyant Basil Blake, who came down to live in one of the sham Tudor houses on the new building estate, bringing with him noisy weekend guests and a permanently resident platinum blonde.

Two other strangers who set the dovecotes fluttering, and whose cottages appear on The Murder at the Vicarage map, were Lawrence Redding and Mrs Lestrange.

‘He’s a very good-looking young fellow,’ said Miss Wetherby of Lawrence Redding. ‘But loose,’ replied Miss Hartnell. ‘Bound to be. An artist! Paris! Models! The Altogether!’ The Vicar kindly lent his garden shed as a studio to this young artist, and in it all Miss Hartnell’s worst prophecies were realized. But no one, not even Miss Marple, could learn much about the appropriately named Mrs Lestrange, and if her ex-husband had not died under mysterious circumstances, her secrets would probably have been safe to this day.

Little Gates, Mrs Lestrange’s house, had formerly belonged to a retired Anglo-Indian colonel, a far more familiar type of newcomer. Indeed, there were a number of collections of brass tables and Burmese idols scattered around St Mary Mead: Major Vaughan at The Larches, for example, and Colonel Wright at Simla Lodge. Bearers, tigers, chota hazri, safari and Kikuyu. became familiar words. But these soldierly old boys and their wives were never regarded as strangers (i.e. primary criminal suspects). Armed with letters of introduction and an old regimental tie, the retired general or commander who came to live in St Mary Mead was welcomed as ‘one of us.’

Two other important people in St Mary Mead were the bank manager and the solicitor. In the early days the solicitor was Mr Petherick, ‘a dried-up little man with eye-glasses which he looked over and not through.’ After his death, his son carried on the family business, but for some reason we learn little of him or of Mr Wells, his successor, except that young Ronnie Wells left St Mary Mead for East Africa to start a series of cargo boats on the lakes and lost all his money in the venture.

The St Mary Mead branch of Middleton’s bank stood at 132 High Street. ‘Do you remember Joan Croft, Bunch?’ Miss Marple once asked a goddaughter. ‘Used to stalk about smoking a cigar or a pipe. We had a Bank hold-up once, and Joan Croft was in the Bank at the time. She knocked the man down and took his revolver away from him. She was congratulated on her courage by the Bench.’ Alas, this is all we ever learn of Joan Croft.

Over the years Miss Marple reminisced about several different bank managers and their families. There was Mr Hodgson, who ‘went on a cruise and married a woman young enough to be his daughter. No idea of where she came from.’ There was Mr Eade, ‘a very conservative man – but perhaps a little too fond of money.’ Young Thomas Eade, his son, turned out to be a bit of a black sheep and ended up in the West Indies. ‘He came home when his father died and inherited quite a lot of money. So nice for him.’ And there was Mr Emmett, who had married beneath him with the unfortunate result that his wife ‘was in a position of great loneliness since she could not, of course, associate with the wives of the trades people.’

Miss Marple no doubt produced this particular ‘of course’ with her head ‘a little on one side looking like an amiable cockatoo,’ for there it was, the undeniable fact that St Mary Mead was divided into two worlds, with an overall consensus that things went much more comfortably if everyone stuck to the one in which the Good Lord had caused them to be born. Which brings us to that section of the village map marked ‘Shops and Small Houses’ and the people who lived and worked in them.

The fishmonger’s, which stood on the High Street overlooking the vicarage road, appears to have been the principal clearinghouse for village information. Over the years this establishment had several different shop assistants and delivery boys, all of whom were called Fred. It becomes confusing to sort out all these young Freds, but we can be sure that at least two of them were different people – Fred Jackson in The Murder at the Vicarage and Fred Tyler, recalled by Miss Marple in A Murder Is Announced. The main function of these young men seems to have been to court girls and distribute the news of the latest felony, along with the kippers and herrings, around the village. In ‘Tape-Measure Murder,’ Miss Marple uttered two words, ‘The fish,’ in reply to Constable Palk’s demand of how, within half an hour of the discovery of the body, she had learned of a murder. Many years later, in A Pocket Full of Rye, the incumbent Fred of that day was to be the innocent cause of Miss Marple’s maid, Gladys, leaving the village for another post and a dreadful fate. One cannot help but hope that she had a few moments of happiness before realizing young Fred was not really interested – perhaps in the mysterious room over the fishmonger’s, which Miss Wetherby once roguishly hinted about to the Vicar. ‘I now know,’ he wrote resignedly, ‘where maids go on their days out.’