Agatha Christie’s Marple

The butcher, genial Mr Murdoch, employed a delivery boy as well, but he never appears to have built up the same following as young Fred. In this establishment it was Mr Murdoch who seems to have acquired a rather amorous reputation, though ‘some people said it was just gossip, and that Mr Murdoch himself liked to encourage the rumours!’

Mr Golden, the baker, had a van as well as a delivery boy; in ‘The Case of the Caretaker’ its door was taken off to serve as a stretcher for the murder victim. Mr Golden also had an ambitious daughter, Jessie, who left St Mary Mead to work as a nursery governess and married the son of the house, who was home on leave from India.

Barnes, the grocer, was a favourite of the old guard and, much to Miss Marple’s relief, his shop was to remain unchanged for the next thirty years. ‘So obliging, comfortable chairs to sit in by the counter, and cosy discussions as to cuts of bacon, and varieties of cheese.’ The greengrocer, however, was another story. In The Murder at the Vicarage we find that he was ‘not behaving at all nicely with the chemist’s wife,’ which was not surprising, considering that the chemist’s shop always seemed to be in a state of marital upheaval.

The chemist, whose wife enjoyed the attentions of the greengrocer, rejoiced in the name of Cherubim. One of Mr Cherubim’s predecessors, a Mr Badger, was recalled by Miss Marple in The Body in the Library. He ‘made a lot of fuss over the young lady who worked in his cosmetics section. Told his wife they must look on her as a daughter and have her live in the house.’ So infatuated did Mr Badger become that he spent a lot of his savings on a diamond bracelet and radio-gramophone for the girl, until he discovered that she was carrying on with another man. Despite this setback Mr Badger seems to have gone from strength to strength, for we next hear of him as a supposed widower in ‘The Herb of Death’ with:

‘… a very young housekeeper – young enough to be not only his daughter but his granddaughter. Not a word to anyone, and his family, a lot of nephews and nieces, full of expectations. And when he died, would you believe it, he’d been secretly married to her for two years?’

The wool shop was run by Mrs Cray, who was ‘devoted to her son, spoilt him, of course. He got in with a very queer lot.’ The paper shop was run by Mrs Pusey, whose nephew ‘brought home stuff he’d stolen and got her to dispose of it … And when the police came round and started asking questions, he tried to bash her on the head.’ Longdon’s, the draper’s, was where Miss Marple had her curtains made up; Mrs Jameson, who ‘turned you out with a nice firm perm,’ did her hair; and Miss Politt, who lived above the post office and was a principal in ‘Tape-Measure Murder,’ was her dressmaker.

St Mary Mead also had a builder named Cargill who ‘bluffed a lot of people into having things done to their houses they never meant to do’; an automobile mechanic named Jenkins who was none too honest over batteries; and a vet, Mr Quinton, whose peccadilloes, if any, have gone unrecorded.

One of the most venerable institutions in the village was Inch’s Taxi Service. It had been started by Mr Inch many years before in the days of horse and cab and, though it had long since graduated to motorcars and other owners, it always retained the name of Inch. The older ladies of St Mary Mead invariably referred to their journeys by taxi as ‘going somewhere “in Inch”, as though they were Jonah and Inch was a whale.’

The post office stood at the crossroads on a corner opposite the church. The postman was absent-minded and so was the postmistress. Griselda once teased her husband:

‘Oh! Len, you adore me. Do you remember that day when I stayed up in town and sent you a wire you never got because the postmistress’s sister was having twins and she forgot to send it round? The state you got into, and you telephoned Scotland Yard and made the most frightful fuss.’

Wrote the Vicar gloomily, ‘There are things one hates being reminded of.’

The afternoon arrival, more or less precisely at two-thirty, of the Much Benham bus at the post office was one of the events of the day in St Mary Mead. Mrs Blade, the postmistress, could be counted on to hurry out to meet it, thus leaving the public telephone unattended for some four minutes, an important fact that helped Miss Marple solve the ‘Tape-Measure Murder:’

On the other side of the crossroads stood the village pub, the Blue Boar. The first landlord we learn of was Joe Bucknell. ‘Such a to-do about his daughter carrying on with young Bailey,’ Miss Marple once recalled. ‘And all the time it was that minx of a wife of his.’ Just when the Bucknells left St Mary Mead is uncertain, but their most memorable successors were the Emmotts. Tom Emmott, ‘a big burly man of middle age with a shifty eye and a truculent jaw,’ was a bit of a blackguard in Colonel Melchett’s opinion. Like Joe Bucknell, he had family problems. His pretty, wayward daughter, Rose, came to an untimely end in the river just below the Mill.

The Blue Boar, like so many other landmarks in St Mary Mead, had some atypical uses. It was a good place to have been seen drinking in, for example, at the moment a murder was supposed to have taken place. It was a comfortable home away from home for visiting chief constables and Scotland Yard inspectors. (‘The Blue Boar gives you a first-rate meal of the joint-and-two-vegetable type,’. the Vicar once told Colonel Melchett wistfully.) When the need arose, it was the most appropriate place in St Mary Mead in which to hold an inquest.

The railway station stood at the opposite end of the village on the branch line to Much Benham. Feelings could run high, and alibis could be overturned, if the trains ran late, a not unusual occurrence. To go up to London (the Thursday cheap return was the favourite excursion), one could catch the morning train or have an early lunch and travel by the 12:15. In either case one had to change at the junction at Much Benham. The evening 6:50 was a popular train on which to come home. If one returned after midnight to find the last train on the branch line to St Mary Mead gone, one could take a taxi from Much Benham – but not, one hopes, to one’s death, as did poor Giuseppe, the Italian butler at Gossington Hall.

To be the resident constable at the St Mary Mead police station must have been an interesting posting. Was it vied for, perhaps, as an important advancement, or meted out as a punishment, like being sent to the Russian Front? Whatever the case, Constable Hurst of The Murder at the Vicarage was described as looking ‘very important but slightly worried,’ and Constable Palk of ‘Tape-Measure Murder’ and The Body in the Library seems to have developed a nervous habit of sucking his moustache. One would have thought, looking back, that one of the advantages of the position would have been the opportunity of working closely with Miss Marple, but, ungratefully enough, the first place these constables invariably seemed to have turned for help was the county police headquarters in Much Benham, presided over by Miss Marple’s old antagonist, Inspector Slack. ‘Inspector Slack? Police Constable Palk here. A report has just come in that the body of a young woman was discovered this morning at seven-fifteen’ – and the hunt would be up, and the big guns would start to arrive.

St Mary Mead came into Much Benham’s domain in many other ways as well. It was there that Colonel Melchett, the county’s chief constable, and Dr Roberts, the coroner, had their offices; it was there, at the mortuary, that one went to view unidentified bodies (brandy was available); it was there, if one was taken ill or met with an accident, that one was rushed to the hospital; it was there, if one was Colonel Bantry, that one went to meetings of the Conservative Association; it was there, if one was Mrs Price Ridley, that one bought one’s formidable hats; it was there, if one had old silver to appraise, that one went to ‘a very good man’; it was there, if one was Griselda, that one went secretly to purchase books on Mother-Lore (only to be discovered in the act of doing so by Miss Marple). ‘Our adjoining town’ the villagers called it, but Much Benham, larger and only two miles away, must have privately regarded St Mary Mead as a potential, if somewhat troublesome, suburb.

Besides popping over to Much Benham, running up to London, calling in for tea, dropping by the Blue Boar, or lending a hand with the parish activities, what else did the inhabitants of St Mary Mead do with their apparently plentiful leisure time? If one was so inclined, one could go to the cinema, attend the Bingo Club, or play ‘village bridge’. If one was energetic, one could patronize the golf links or play tennis. If one was more sedentary, one could garden, bird watch, or visit the lending library. But above all, if one was an inhabitant of St Mary Mead, much of one’s time was taken up by crime – as either a perpetrator, victim, or spectator thereof – for it is a fact that, over the years, the number of crimes, particularly murders, committed within the borders of this one small English village appears to have reached an extraordinarily high level in proportion to its modest size.

Consider the record. A search through Marpelian literature will reveal that over a period of some forty years, there occurred in St Mary Mead a total of sixteen murders – five by poisoning, two by shooting, two by drowning, two by strangling, and five by unidentified means – plus four attempts at murder by poisoning, smothering, and bashing on the head. In the same period there occurred five robberies, eight embezzlements, two series of blackmailing, several illegal impersonations, a case or two of poaching, and a number of crank phone calls, poison-pen letters, and criminal libels. Faced with these statistics, one cannot help but count St Mary Mead fortunate in having had, in the same period of time, a resident sleuth of the stature of Miss Marple. Without her indomitable presence, where would it all have ended? Characteristically, she herself took a modest view of her accomplishments: ‘Very nasty things go on in a village, I assure you,’ she once murmured. ‘One has an opportunity of studying things there that one would never have in town.’

Thus St Mary Mead about the year 1935. Periodically, in the years to follow, Miss Marple would be heard to complain that ‘St Mary Mead was not the place it had been,’ but to revisit it in the fifties, sixties, and seventies was to find many of its inhabitants and institutions older but reassuringly unchanged. Miss Wetherby, alas, ‘had passed on and her house was now inhabited by the bank manager and his family, having been given a face-lift by the painting of doors and windows a bright royal blue,’ and Mrs Price Ridley had faded from the scene, but Miss Hartnell’s stentorian voice was still to be heard ‘fighting progress to the last gasp,’ and Dr Haydock, now elderly and semi-retired, still called upon Miss Marple to prescribe a ‘nice juicy murder’ as her best tonic. Though Mrs Jameson, the hairdresser, ‘had steeled herself to going as far in the cause of progress as to repaint her sign and call herself “DIANE. HAIR STYLIST.” … the shop remained much as before and catered in much the same way to the needs of the clients,’ while elsewhere on the High Street, the most recent scandal concerning the chemist’s wife continued to hold the village’s attention. Old ladies could still depend on faithful Inch, and while there were new faces at the St Mary Mead and Much Benham police stations, their owners seemed as incapable of preventing the less attractive members of the community from murdering or being murdered as had their predecessors.

Nevertheless, some real changes did occur in St Mary Mead in those postwar decades: the building of the new Development, for example, and the wave of outsiders it brought with it; the alterations to the High Street; the arrival of a glittering new supermarket; and the rather frightening proximity of an airfield (a jet plane once broke the sound barrier and two windows in Miss Marple’s greenhouse at the same time). All these were radical departures from the past. Next door to Miss Marple, an even more profound change occurred with the departure of the Clements and the arrival of a new, and even more absent-minded, vicar.

Perhaps the most interesting changes of all were the ones that took place at Gossington Hall. Following the death of Colonel Bantry, Mrs Bantry, who became as comfortable and cheerful a widow as she had been a wife, sold Gossington Hall, keeping the East Lodge for herself. Cast adrift, Gossington Hall had a checkered career reminiscent of Old Hall in the 1930s. First run as an unsuccessful guest house, it was then

bought by four people who had shared it as four roughly divided flats and subsequently quarrelled. Finally the Ministry of Health had bought it for some obscure purpose for which they eventually did not want it.

The next owner was far more exciting, easily the most glamorous outsider ever to alight in St Mary Mead. A film star of international repute, Marina Gregg arrived in the village with her fifth husband and a retinue of assorted eccentrics to live in a fabulously renovated Gossington Hall. Tarted up, it once again proved a splendid place for bodies. Three, possibly four, sensational killings in quick succession were enough to set a village, even one as experienced as St Mary Mead, completely agog.

And what of St Mary Mead today? Does an Arab sheik now preside over the palm court and pool at Gossington Hall? If so, what is his imminent fate? As Development follows Development, will St Mary Mead disappear entirely into the boundaries of an unsuspecting Much Benham? Has a judicial inquiry been appointed, or a Royal Commission struck, to investigate the uncontrollable rise in village crime since the sad departure of its resident Nemesis?

‘I regard St Mary Mead as a stagnant pool,’ Miss Marple’s sophisticated young nephew once remarked.

‘That is really not a very good simile, dear Raymond,’ his aunt replied briskly. ‘Nothing, I believe, is so full of life under the microscope as a drop of water from a stagnant pool.’

* A charming country town and a favourite haunt during the 1920s and 1930s of a well-known contemporary of Miss Marple’s, M. Hercule Poirot. See Dumb Witness and ‘The Market Basing Mystery’ (in Poirot’s Early Cases).

† At risk of further confusing the reader, it should be added that Miss Marple’s St Mary Mead is not the village of the same name described in The Mystery of the Blue Train. That St Mary Mead is in Kent.

2 MISS MARPLE’S EARLIER LIFE

‘I live very quietly in the country, you see.’

—Miss Marple, NEMESIS

Miss Marple was born at the age of sixty-five to seventy – which, as with Poirot, proved most unfortunate, because she was going to have to last a long time in my life,’ wrote Agatha Christie in her autobiography. Embryonically, Miss Marple may have had some early relationship to Caroline, the doctor’s sister in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, which was published four years before the first appearance of Miss Marple. Of Caroline, Dr Sheppard said:

‘The motto of the mongoose family, so Mr Kipling tells us, is: “Go and find out.” If Caroline ever adopts a crest, I should certainly suggest a mongoose rampant. One might omit the first part of the motto. Caroline can do any amount of finding out by sitting placidly at home. I don’t know how she manages it, but there it is.’

Agatha Christie was fond of Caroline, and when, in an adaptation of Roger Ackroyd to the stage, she was replaced by a young, attractive girl, she resented her removal very much: ‘I liked the part she played in village life … I think at that moment, in St Mary Mead, though I did not yet know it, Miss Marple was born.’*

Agatha Christie’s grandmother and her friends provided further inspiration. Miss Marple was, in Agatha Christie’s words,

the sort of old lady who would have been rather like some of my grandmother’s Ealing cronies – old ladies whom I have met in so many villages where I have gone to stay as a girl. Miss Marple was not in any way a picture of my grandmother; she was far more fussy and spinsterish than my grandmother ever was. But one thing she did have in common with her – though a cheerful person, she always expected the worst of everyone and everything, and was, with almost frightening accuracy, usually proved right.

Despite Miss Marple’s first appearance as a detective at the age of sixty-five or thereabouts, it is possible to piece together something of her childhood and girlhood from clues she occasionally dropped in conversation during her extraordinarily long old age. Characteristically, she had from the beginning an excellent memory: ‘I’ve always remembered the mauve irises on my nursery walls and yet I believe it was re-papered when I was only three.’ On this wallpaper, over her bed, was pinned a prophetic text: Ask and you shall receive.

There was probably only one other child in the nursery, a sister, and the two little girls seem to have spent the sort of strict, sheltered, governess-run lives familiar to us from the first chapters of many Victorian autobiographies.

There are reports of long hours in the schoolroom. In old age Miss Marple knew very well how hard it was for youth to picture her ‘young and pigtailed and struggling with decimals and English literature,’ but adds, wryly, ‘I was, I think, well educated for the standard of my day. My sister and I had a German governess – a Fräulein. A very sentimental creature. She taught us the language of flowers.’ This mild disrespect for the kind of education girls of her time received was once confided to, of all people, her old enemy, Inspector Slack:

‘So difficult, you know, to explain oneself, don’t you think? … not having been educated in the modern style – just a governess, you know, who taught one the dates of the Kings of England and General Knowledge … Discursive, you know, but not teaching one to keep to the point.’

To her great ally, Inspector Craddock, when he spoke admiringly of the women of her generation, she replied:

‘I’m sure, my dear boy, you would find the young lady of the type you refer to as a very inadequate helpmeet nowadays. Young ladies were not encouraged to be intellectual and very few of them had university degrees or any kind of academic distinction.’

There were many dos and don’ts: ‘Miss Marple sat very upright because she had been taught to use a back-board as a girl’; ‘In my young days it was considered to be very bad manners to take medicines with one’s meals. It was on a par with blowing your nose at the dinner table’; ‘When I was a girl, Inspector, nobody ever mentioned the word stomach.’

But there were useful compensations: riddles and Mother Goose rhymes in early childhood, playing with disappearing ink, conjuring tricks (‘It was the trick of the Lady Sawn in Half that made me think of it,’ she was to say many years later to a bemused Inspector Curry), and visits to Madame Tussaud’s.

Who were her parents, and where did they live? We are never told exactly, but a distinctly clerical pattern, almost Mafia-like in its family connections, seems to emerge. Miss Marple was, we do know, a ‘pink and white English girl from a Cathedral Close’ and probably, therefore, the daughter of a canon or the dean of a cathedral. One of the few mentions of her father was of him bringing home bronzes purchased at the Paris Exhibition. We are also given a glimpse of Miss Marple’s mother and grandmother in Paris:

‘We went to have tea at the Elysée Hotel. And my grandmother looked round, and she said suddenly, “Clara, I do believe I am the only woman here in a bonnet!” And she was, too! When she got home she packed up all her bonnets, and her beaded mantles too – and sent them off.’

It is clear that these two, her mother and grandmother, undertook to initiate Miss Marple at an early age into the obligations and mysteries of being a lady. ‘To wit: that a true lady can neither be shocked nor surprised’; that ‘a gentlewoman should always be able to control herself in public, however much she may give way in private’; and, above all, that a lady must always do her duty: ‘Port wine jelly and calf’s head broth taken to the sick. My mother used to do it.’

In later years Miss Marple was to speak of ‘the old days, with all the big family reunions.’ At such gatherings there were no doubt assembled her aunts: her Great Aunt Fanny, for example, who told Miss Marple when she was sixteen that ‘young people think the old people are fools – but the old people know the young people are fools!’; her Aunt Helen who, perhaps because she had never been to Paris, would probably arrive wearing a bonnet and what she always called her ‘black poplin’ mantle; the survivor aunt, whose name we do not know, who had been shipwrecked on five different occasions; and the detective aunt, no doubt a significant early model, who could smell when people told lies, because ‘their noses twitched, she said, and then the smell came.’

Also arriving would be the uncles: Great Uncle Thomas, the retired admiral, who lived in a handsome terrace in Richmond; Uncle Henry, the bachelor, described on one occasion as ‘a man of unusual self-control,’ and on another as someone who was given to temper tantrums over food and a habit of keeping a great deal of money hidden in his library behind volumes of sermons. And then would come the canons: the uncle who was a canon of Chichester Cathedral, and Uncle Thomas, who was a canon of Ely.

Her cousins, Anthony and Gordon, would probably be there as well. ‘Whatever Anthony did always went right for him, and with poor Gordon it was just the other way about; race horses went lame, and stocks went down.’ Cousin Fanny Godfrey, who stuttered, would no doubt be present, and perhaps Cousin Ethel, Lady Merridew, who lived in style in Lowndes Square. Many years later Miss Marple was to gaze upon a painful scene – a vast skyscraper of modern design built upon the site where Lady Merridew’s house once stood. ‘There must be progress I suppose,’ mused Miss Marple. ‘If Cousin Ethel knew, she’d turn in her grave, I’m sure.’

At fourteen Miss Marple was given a great treat – a visit to London with her Aunt Helen and Uncle Thomas, the Canon of Ely, to stay At Bertram’s Hotel. Forever after, Bertram’s, ‘dignified, unostentatious and quietly expensive,’ was to remain in Miss Marple’s mind as the ultimate holiday. It was probably during a visit such as this that a pilgrimage was made across Battersea Bridge to visit a retired governess, Miss Ledbury, who lived at Princes Terrace Mansions, and it was almost certainly the occasion for one of her Aunt Helen’s memorable expeditions, niece in tow, to the grocery department of the Army & Navy Stores, there to seek out ‘our special man’ from whom to order, in an ensuing leisurely hour,

every conceivable grocery that could be purchased and stored up for future use. Christmas was provided for, and there was even a far-off look towards Easter. The young Jane had fidgeted somewhat, and been told to go and look at the glass department by way of amusement … Having had a thoroughly pleasant morning, Aunt Helen would say in the playful manner of those times ‘And how would a little girl feel about some luncheon.’ Whereupon they went up in the lift to the fourth floor and had luncheon which always finished with a strawberry ice.

To round off her education, Miss Marple was sent, at about the age of sixteen, to school in Florence. There she met two American girls, Ruth and Carrie Louise Martin, ‘exciting to the English girl because of their quaint ways of speech and their forthright manner and vitality.’ They were to become her lifelong friends. ‘In spite of all my aches and pains,’ Carrie Louise was to say to Miss Marple nearly fifty years later, ‘it seems only a few months ago that we were at Florence. Do you remember Fräulein Schweich and her boots?’

‘Of course it was the fashion when we were young to have ideals,’ Carrie’s sister, Ruth, once said to Miss Marple.