For many Christie fans the 12th of September, will be like an early Christmas, as the long awaited* sequel to Agatha Christie’s Poirot: The Greatest Detective in the World (2020) will be released. Today I will be sharing my own thoughts on the book and tomorrow I will be posting the interview I did with Mark, who was game for my more unusual questions.
*Four years realistically is not too long to wait for a non-fiction book, but as many a book lover will tell you it can still feel like a long time if you’re itching to read something.
Agatha Christie’s Marple begins with a foreword by Lucy Foley, in which several interesting points are raised:
‘Of the entire Christie oeuvre, I believe the Marple books are the ones that most reward the reader on a second or third reading. This is because they rely less upon killer hooks (though there are some brilliant ones – see A Murder is Announced or Sleeping Murder) and more on a deep understanding of character. They have at their heart a detective who solves crimes, not through physical evidence, but via an unparalleled insight into the souls of other human beings, a formidable ability to scent out evil wherever she goes. Miss Marple is a character who changes through the books as a real person would: who ages, who grows more philosophical and tolerant in some respects and more formidable and severe in others.’
Are the Marple mysteries the most re-readable of Christie’s canon? It is a tricky question, as it hard for me to ignore the richness of some of the other Christie’s I have re-read, such as Death on the Nile (1937). However, I thought it would be fun to see what you think, so I have decided to run a poll during September, to see which section of Christie’s work you find the most re-readable:
I think I would also add The Body in the Library (1942) to Foley’s list of Marple books with brilliant hooks, as the reveal of the corpse at the beginning of the book is done so effectively. I don’t think I would say Miss Marple ignores or eschews physical evidence when solving her cases. Instead, I would argue that her prior knowledge and intuition give her a different way of interpreting physical clues, such as chewed fingernails, a style of dress, or a stone gifted to her rockery.
Foley also remarks in her foreword that she ‘only truly appreciated the extent to which Christie engages with the modern and keeps up with the changing times after reading’ Mark’s book. It was very pleasing and encouraging to read this going into the work myself, as I am not a fan of the viewpoint that Christie’s mysteries were stuck in an eternal 1930s, detached from ongoing social change. So, I am all for Mark’s Agatha Christie’s Marple if it will help to prove the contrary to this erroneous perception. I enjoyed the quote Mark found from one reviewer for the Chicago newspaper, the Tribune. When reviewing They Do It with Mirrors, they wrote that Christie, ‘as an observer of social current, she is unmatched.’
I felt Mark’s introduction provided a balanced and thoughtful pen portrait of Miss Marple. I liked the extra little details he included, such as quoting Christianna Brand’s tart thoughts on the character:
‘For fellow mystery writer Christianna Brand, Miss Marple was surely created to be the antithesis to Hercule Poirot, who Brand considered to be “all shine and show-off”. Brand described Miss Marple as “the very pink of modest self-deprecation,” with her “quiet confidence in her own powers”, which is “robustly bolstered up, should it ever fail her by the adulation of her somewhat unremarkable friends.”’
Although some of the points raised are not “new”, I enjoyed the way Mark includes these ideas by drawing upon Christie’s own words, such as when she refers, in her autobiography, to the influence of Caroline Sheppard on the creation of Miss Marple. This narrative strategy helps to bring Miss Marple to life, taking a two-dimensional drawing and making it become three-dimensional, flesh and blood, with colour, shade and light.
The structure of Agatha Christie’s Marple is useful for those less familiar with the Miss Marple cases, as Mark gives extended plot summaries, with accompanying comments on publication history. I found these sections to be a bit description heavy, but as someone conversant with the plots of Marple’s stories, I am not the target audience of them, and the book does need to cater to a variety of prior knowledge levels. This is a tricky balancing act to manage. There are no spoilers in the main text, which is great for readers who might not have read all the Miss Marple tales, but it does restrict the analysis which can be included.
This work puts some new ideas forward, although I was not convinced by all of them. For example, one such idea is:
‘When Agatha Christie first introduced Miss Marple as a “spinster”, it seems plausible that she was thinking of her own circumstances as much as her memories of elderly relatives. Although she did not fit the definition of “spinster”, having been married and had a child, for a while Christie saw her future as a single woman, and perhaps Miss Marple was an indication of her optimism for this new course of her life.’
I felt this was an idea which needed bolstering with some evidential support from outside sources, as it is rather left hanging in the text.
However, there were many more ideas, which really intrigued me, as they were thoughts/perspectives that I had not considered before. For instance, I do think Mark makes a very worthwhile point about considering the context in which Miss Marple came about:
‘It should be no surprise to anyone that Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple has always been a reassuring presence […] Agatha Christie’s career was flourishing just as her life seemed to be falling apart. So it is notable that it was shortly after these events that she created a new character whose entire raison d’etre was to be a calm point in a stormy sea.’
Some other ideas which interested me:
- ‘For Christie, The Thirteen Problems contains “the real essence of Miss Marple for those who like her.”’ I am much more familiar with the Miss Marple of the novels, so I found this to be an interesting point. This is a collection I have been meaning to re-read for years, and Mark’s book is yet another reminder that I really need to do so, as it would be interesting to compare Miss Marple as she is in The Thirteen Problems, with the Miss Marple of the novels (although she is not a static personality in the longer works).
- Christie wrote N or M? (1941) alongside The Body in the Library (1942), which given their publication dates does not seem initially startling. But it got me wondering about the possible comparisons or parallels that could be made. Both novels feature men underestimating women, for an overall comic effect. They both contain lodgings, although the hotel of The Body in the Library is somewhat more glamorous than the boarding house setting of N or M?. However, both locations open themselves to the theme of identity, as in such places you have to take people at face value and in mystery novels you can never be sure people are who they say they are. I would also say both stories include the vulnerability of youth, albeit in different ways. Traps appear in both stories, but I think Miss Marple is rather more in control of hers.
- The activities involved in being a writer have changed over the decades, with the author having to spend much more time now personally promoting their work. So it interested me to read Christie’s thoughts on this aspect of being an author. She did not think public appearances were ‘not part of an author’s life. If you act, or if you are an M. P. or a public spirited woman who sits on committees, then you are part of it.’ How times have changed!
- Similarly, Christie’s career demonstrates the power of a publisher promoting a given title. A Murder is Announced (1950) received a lot of promotion through the celebrations involved for Christie’s 50th title. Mark informs us that it sold ‘around 42,000 copies in the first two months’. However, the following year ‘her standalone thriller They Came to Baghdad managed to do even better, such as the momentum of her success.’ I don’t think They Came to Baghdad (1951) achieved this additional success through superior merit, as it’s not a bad book, but it is no one’s And Then There Were None (1939). But it does demonstrate that publisher promotion really does have a big effect on book sales.
- More than one person, at the time Christie wrote 4.50 from Paddington (1957), thought she might ditch Miss Marple and supplant her with Lucy Eyelesbarrow in future stories. A reader at Collins queried this and a reviewer for The Western Mail also wrote: ‘Miss Christie, who I believe hates the sight and sound of Hercule Poirot, is obviously on the point of killing ff Miss Marple, and switching to Lucy Eyelesbarrow.’ Given the stage of Christie’s career I think such a change was unlikely, but would a younger Christie have considered bringing Lucy back for further adventures? It is a tricky question to answer as Christie may have just seen Lucy as another Emily Trefusis (see The Sittaford Mystery (1931)), a good character, but still dispensable or as a one-use only. Moreover, Christie already had the character of Tuppence Beresford, so she may not have seen the need to add a further series character, to her portfolio, in that mould.
- When it comes to the discussion of Nemesis (1971), Mark writes that: ‘Over the years many critics have suggested that Christie moving over to dictating her novels corresponds with an increasing looseness of her plots. Christie acknowledged that this method “encourages you to be much too verbose” and that “There is no doubt that the effort involved in typing or writing does help me in keeping to the point. Economy of wording, I think, is particularly necessary in detective stories. You don’t want to hear the same thing rehashed three or four times over. But it is tempting when one is speaking into a Dictaphone to say the same thing over and over again in slightly different words.”’ I was aware Christie used a Dictaphone later in her career, but I had never really considered the effect it might have on her writing. I am not sure it is a practice I would adopt for my own writing, having been driven batty by Dragon Software during my time at university.
Agatha Christie’s Marple is stuffed full of information that I think practically all Christie buffs will find out something new. Here is a collection of some of the new-to-me facts that I came across:
- Mark references an idea which comes up in Janet Morgan’s biography of Christie, regarding the story, ‘The Blood-Stained Pavement’: ‘In the real world, Joyce’s vision may have had its origins in Christie once seeing her sister Madge’s face covered in blood… only to learn that it was actually dyed nougat.’
- The Murder at the Vicarage (1930) was likely to have been ‘written in 1929, which means that this is the only Miss Marple novel that Christie wrote as an unmarried woman.’ An idea gleamed from the research done by John Curran, and it sounds like the perfect material for an Agatha Christie pub quiz question.
- ‘The Love Detective’ is not a Christie short story I was hugely familiar with, so I was interested to learn that it was ‘one influence on The Murder at the Vicarage. It ‘[…] was first published in 1926. This mystery also features a pair of lovers who each claim responsibility for a murder, and it reaches a similar conclusion to this novel.’
- ‘Miss Marple Tells a Story’ is a radio short story from 1934. It was a replacement for a story the BBC had rejected, ‘In a Glass Darkly’. Mark’s comments on this story reveal his excellent detective work, as he notes that: ‘For many years it has generally been accepted that Christie read out the story on air, but this was not the case. This claim seems to be a case of crossed wires within the BBC, given the fact that Christie was pencilled in to be the reader of ‘In a Glass Darkly’ before that broadcast was cancelled. The Radio Times did not name her as the reader […] at the time, but made the claim three years later when it stated that she read the story as well as her contribution to Behind the Curtain and The Scoop […]’. It turns out it was Gladys Young who was the reader and therefore the ‘first person to play Miss Marple’. Another piece of information for the perfect Christie pub quiz.
- When Agatha Christie’s Marple discusses radio, TV and film, I feel it really begins to shine, as it is able to put to good use the research Mark conducted for his earlier book Agatha Christie on Screen (2016). Having read this previous work, some of the film information was familiar to me, as I remembered some of the anecdotes shared there. However, there is plenty of new stuff and I did laugh at the fact that in the 1949 BBC performance of And Then There Were None ‘the General was seen walking off set after he had “died”’.
- Mark’s book draws upon some less well-known sources such as an interview Christie did in 1922 with the Pall Mall Gazette. She is quoted as having said: ‘My friends shake their heads and sigh that one so young – I am rather young, I admit – should refuse to dwell only on the seamy side of life; but as long as right triumphs in the end – and in my books it does – what does it matter? To tell you the truth, that is the only thing that gives me a twinge of remorse. Suppose I led the young and innocent to believe that the good always do come out on top, and the wicked end their days in misery or terror? They would find life so disappointing!’ This is not an interview that I have read, so it was nice to see Christie’s ideas on her work at the start of her career. Moreover, it is interesting to read this above comment in the light of some of her later works, such as Crooked House (1949), Ordeal by Innocence (1958), At Bertram’s Hotel (1965) and Curtain (1975), which complicate this previous viewpoint.
- When the Saturday Evening Post printed The Body in the Library for publication in America, it removed chapter 10 of the story. Mark further adds that: ‘More unusually, the American book publication from Dodd Mead in February the following year also omitted this chapter. In the United States, this omission continued for further printings and subsequent paperbacks for decades, meaning that many readers on that side of the Atlantic will not have read the full version of the novel.’ The Moving Finger (1943) had a similar publication history, and this impacted the 1953 Penguin edition, which used the shorter American text. This is an example of the diligent research, which has gone into the writing of Agatha Christie’s Marple. The author notices little details like this, but we would expect no less from a man who spends so much time researching literary figures such as Hercule Poirot.
- When it came to the plotting of A Murder is Announced, Christie ‘enacted the scenario with her neighbours in Wallingford, Oxfordshire’ to make sure the practicalities of the central crime worked. If you are the neighbour of a crime writer, do you get to do such things? If not, I think you should suggest it.
- The original American version of 4.50 from Paddington retains a conversation in which Miss Marple reveals her age. The UK version removed them before publication, thinking it best not to dwell too much on how old Miss Marple ought to be.
- When discussing Miss Marple in the 1960s, Mark notes that ‘Miss Marple’s earlier adventures remained in print and widely read’ and ‘in June 1960, a school in Nairobi even wrote to the author to ask if they could set up their own “Tuesday Night Club”: her agents had no objection.’ Now that is the sort of school club I would have wanted to have joined!
- This book is not just about learning new facts, but it is also an opportunity to see different sides to Christie’s own character. The text doesn’t necessarily aim to do this directly, but it is a positive consequence of the author’s writing style. For example, Mark writes that: ‘In April 1963, Agatha Christie responded to a journalist who had recently interviewed Margaret Rutherford about Miss Marple, and wanted to hear a few words from the character’s creator. A few words were all he received, as Christie gave the briefest of responses to all his questions. Why have an old lady as a detective, he wondered: “No particular reason”, was Christie’s reply. Was Miss Marple based on a particular person? No, Christie claimed, she was “A fairly typical old lady of an old fashioned type.” Margaret Rutherford was “Suggested by MGM”, and the advice Christie gave to her was simply “None”. As for any future Miss Marple plans: “Indefinitely, yes.” Christie would soon work on back-to-back Miss Marple novels, and in part this seems to be borne out of a keenness to wrestle back the public image of the character from the films that had become so popular.’ The brevity of Christie’s remarks speak volumes, and I was interested in Mark’s ideas as to why Christie wrote back-to-back Miss Marple mysteries. I knew they became more frequent as Christie got older, but I hadn’t really thought as fully about the reasons for this.
- In a similar vein something else I had never spotted was that the original publication of A Caribbean Mystery (1964) included the following disclaimer ‘as a side-swipe at the MGM films’: ‘Featuring MISS MARPLE The Original Character as Created by Me’. Mark adds that ‘Christie then scrubbed out “Me” […] replacing it with ‘AGATHA CHRISTIE’, and the book followed suit upon publication.’ I love how Christie uses this occasion to vent.
- Changes made to texts are not always big, but they can sometimes remove some more amusing lines. ‘Strange Jest’ has one such example. Mark notes that in: ‘Christie’s original version, as published in The Strand’ situates ‘the young couples’ initial consultation with Miss Marple’ in the ‘bathroom. Miss Marple then finds herself sitting on the lavatory (albeit with a closed seat) while hearing all about the buried treasure; this makes her blush “in an old-fashioned way since she had been brought up never to mention lavatories, much less hold social gatherings in one.” Other printings move the scene to a small sitting room.’ Which I for one think is a shame!
- In 1986, The Two Ronnies produced a sketch called ‘The Teddy Bear Who Knows Too Much’, but I never knew it had been inspired by the Joan Hickson Miss Marple adaptations.
One aspect of researching vintage crime fiction, which I have always enjoyed, is reading contemporary reviews of these works. At times they provide an interesting sidelight on a book, or they can just be outrageously funny. Christie’s contemporary reviews are no different and I enjoyed reading the critics Mark quotes. One of the reviews that I found particularly funny, due to being a classic back handed compliment, comes from the Times Literary Supplement: ‘Agatha Christie deserves her fame […] Her writing is abominably careless, her formula hopelessly out of fate; but, forty-two years after her criminal debut, she still offers an incomparably readable, skilful and amusing detective story.’
Agatha Christie’s Marple understandably works in chronological order, and it was intriguing to see how the tone of the reviews changed as Christie got older, wrote more books and of course became more famous. I think the reviews for her earlier mysteries, when she was less of a phenomenon are quite enlightening. There was quite a variety of reactions to The Murder at the Vicarage, for instance. The News Chronicle wrote ‘that Christie “ought to be a village scandal-monger – she does it so well,”’ and the reviewer was keen for her to write more about the curious events at St Mary Mead: ‘Could not Mrs Christie write a new Cranford – a Cranford of Crime?”’. Interestingly, if Christie had gone down that road, it is arguable that the Miss Marple mysteries would have been far closer in style to a modern cozy crime novel. Not everyone enjoyed Miss Marple’s first novel-length case. ‘The New York Times found village life tiresome, stating that “The talented Miss Christie is far from being at her best in her latest mystery story. It will add little to her eminence in the field of detective fiction… the average reader is apt to grow weary of it all, particularly of the amiable Miss Marple.”’ I think generations of readers would disagree with this latter statement. However, ‘The Brooklyn Citizen praised the inhabitants of village life, with the residents and suspects “less mechanical puppets dangling on strings than real honest to goodness, flesh and blood, living figures… we have here a book which Agatha Christie fans may well term her best book.”’ We might view this statement differently with our hindsight and knowledge of the books which would follow, but even Dorothy L. Sayers, in a letter, wrote: ‘I think this is the best you have done – almost – though I am very fond of Roger Ackroyd.’ So here we have another interesting question: By 1930 what was the best Christie book?
Mark is very fair in quoting a variety of different opinions of Miss Marple and Christie’s writing, some more complimentary than others. Yet it would have been nice to have seen a little more of Mark’s own thoughts on these opinions. Interestingly, the last 20 years or so of Christie adaptations are discussed in the relatively short space of 30-35 pages, but I enjoyed reading the information on the adaptations from around the world and how they ‘rework the role of an older female lead detective.’ Mark gathers and collects information effectively, from a wide range of resources and I think he uses his research well, weaving in quotes from interesting places, such as Christie’s article ‘Does a Woman’s Instinct Make Her a Good Detective?’, which can be read in full in Murder She Said: The Quotable Miss Marple (2019). For the reader who is just starting out on discovering more about Christie’s elderly female sleuth, Agatha Christie’s Marple brings a lot together into one handy volume. Furthermore, it is a work which contains infectious enthusiasm for Miss Marple, making you want to pick up and read, or re-read, another of her cases. So, a job well done indeed!
Rating: 4.25/5
Source: Review Copy (Harper Collins)
See also: JJ at The Invisible Event released his latest podcast episode in which he talks with Mark about his latest book.