MURDER,
SHE SAID
‘If you want to discuss murder,’ said Raymond, ‘you must talk to my Aunt Jane.’
‘Greenshaw’s Folly’
Copyright
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
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First published 2019
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Source ISBN: 9780008356323
Ebook Edition © 2019 ISBN: 9780008356347
Version: 2019-08-15
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Introducing Miss Jane Marple
The Art of Conversation
Men and Women
Crime & Detection
The Young
Murder!
Miss Marple on Miss Marple
Human Nature
Life
Postscript: Does a Woman’s Instinct Make Her a Good Detective?
Miss Marple’s Casebook
Also Available
Miss Marple Books and Stories
About the Publisher
‘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.’
Agatha Christie
An Autobiography
Agatha Christie’s other great detective, Miss Jane Marple, first appeared in December 1927 in a series of short stories published in the Royal magazine.
Christie herself suggested that Miss Marple should be seen as a shrewder version of Caroline Sheppard, a woman whose brother helped a certain retired Belgian police officer to investigate The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926). Miss Sheppard had been Agatha Christie’s ‘favourite character in the book – an acidulated spinster full of curiosity, knowing everything, hearing everything: the complete detective service in the home’, someone in fact very much like the friends of Agatha Christie’s much loved step-grandmother, ‘Auntie-Granny’ Margaret Miller, whose influence can also be detected in the character of Miss Marple.
In the first story which she appears, ‘The Tuesday Night Club’, Miss Marple is discovered ‘at home’ in Danemead, her house in the pretty village of St Mary Mead. She is sitting erect by the hearth in a room with broad black beams across the ceiling, furnished with ‘good old furniture that belonged to it’. She is knitting and wearing ‘a black brocade dress, very much pinched in around the waist. Mechlin lace was arranged in a cascade down the front of the bodice. She had on black mittens, and a black lace cap surmounted the piled-up masses of her snowy hair’. Tonight she has a visitor, the writer Raymond West who is her favourite nephew, and this evening they are entertaining some of Raymond’s friends. Miss Marple almost passes unnoticed in the group’s discussion of one unsolved mystery after another until in each case she, and she alone, points unerringly to the truth by applying the insights into human nature that she has gained from a lifetime of observation.
‘An old lady with a sweet, placid spinsterish face, and a mind that has plumbed the depths of human iniquity.’
Sir Henry Clithering, The Body in the Library
Although the precise date of her birth would seem to be unknowable, there are several glimpses of Miss Marple’s early life in the twelve novels and twenty short stories in which she appears.
We know that Jane Marple was born in the second half of the nineteenth century and that, with her sister, she was home-schooled by Miss Ledbury and other governesses. When she was a little older, Jane was sent to a boarding school in Florence where she learned French and, with her hair in pigtails, she was taught decimals and English literature by a German governess.
Although Jane appears to have had only the one sibling, she came from a very large family and in the stories there are fleeting references to her mother and her grandmother as well as various cousins and countless aunts and uncles, great aunts and great uncles, nieces, nephews and godchildren. And while she never married, there were certainly men in her life, such as a young man she met at a croquet party who had seemed eligible but turned out to be very, very dull. Jane was anything but dull. She enjoyed dancing, opera at Covent Garden and the theatre.
Jane was not without a sense of the theatrical herself. She had a fondness for practical trickery and a talent for mimicry which would one day save someone’s life. She read widely, including books by Jerome K. Jerome and, as an adult, those of Dashiell Hammett. She enjoyed poetry and could quote from Swinburne and Shakespeare as well as from the Bible, which she would sometimes misquote for her own amusement. Jane appreciated art, particularly the art of the magician, and enjoyed conjuring tricks, cinema and Madame Tussaud’s, the wax museum in London.
As a child, Jane very much enjoyed going shopping at the Army & Navy Store in Victoria with her Aunt Helen, whose husband was Canon of Ely Cathedral, and she sometimes stayed with another uncle who was Canon of Chichester Cathedral. Clearly, hers was a very Christian family and, when she was a child, a biblical homily was pinned above her bed – ‘Ask and you shall receive’. It was a text Jane Marple would keep in mind throughout her life: if she was in trouble, she would say a little prayer and she maintained that she always received an answer. She believed in eternal life and kept by her bedside a copy of The Imitation of Christ, a devotional volume by Thomas à Kempis.
‘She’s had a long life of experience in evil, in noticing evil, fancying evil, suspecting evil and going forth to do battle with evil.’
Chief Inspector Fred Davy, At Bertram’s Hotel
Significantly, given her later commitment to rooting out evil, Jane Marple never had any doubt that those who commit the severest of crimes should receive the severest of punishments and she was more than ready herself to be ruthless in the cause of justice, even to the extent of setting traps and lying.
Though she was raised in a city, Miss Marple spent most of her life in the country, in the village of St Mary Mead, which her nephew regarded as ‘the kind of village where nothing ever happens. Exactly like a stagnant pond’, a comment that earned a stern rebuke from his aunt: ‘Nothing, I believe, is so full of life under the microscope as a drop of water from a stagnant pool’. The name of St Mary Mead, along with those of other towns and geographical features, suggest that the village is somewhere on the border of West Sussex and Hampshire though Dr Marty S. Knepper has suggested that when Agatha Christie created the village she was in fact thinking of Sunningdale in Berkshire.
Miss Marple went to church on Sundays and she was well-known at all levels of society in the village, from the v
illage policeman and the barmaid at The Blue Boar pub to the chief constable of the county and the vicar by whom she was regularly invited for Christmas dinner.
While life in St Mary Mead presented some frustrations for Miss Marple, not least the haphazard performance of domestic servants and the inability to buy proper glass cloths and good quality household linen, she loved it for the opportunities it provided to examine the human condition. ‘So many interesting human problems – giving rise to endless pleasurable hours of speculation …’
Throughout her life when pondering more serious problems she would often identify a village parallel, such as the mysterious disappearance of two gills of pickled shrimps or the curious instance of the gardener who worked on a bank holiday.
However, not everyone liked Miss Marple. While Inspector Neele thought she was ‘nice, very shrewd’, one murder suspect considered her to be ‘an old hag’ and the vicar’s wife regarded her as ‘that terrible Miss Marple … the worst cat in the village … she knows every single thing that happens – and draws the worst inferences from it’. She was even considered ‘dangerous’ by the vicar for all that he liked her and admired her sense of humour.
As well as the proclivities of her neighbours, Miss Marple also knew a thing or two about birds and gardening, creating in her own garden a Japanese area and a rockery; and she very much preferred flowers – especially peonies – to vegetables. It was a very sad day for her when, not least because of her arthritis and a rheumatic knee, the village doctor instructed her to stop stooping and kneeling, effectively bringing her gardening hobby to an end.
Inside Danemead, Miss Marple enjoyed home-baking – for her, fresh bread had ‘the most delicious smell in the world’ and she loved plum tart. She also enjoyed making her own cowslip wine and plum brandy and also cherry brandy, made to her grandmother’s recipe. However, while she was never an advocate of teetotalism, Miss Marple did have other Victorian sensibilities. She disliked bodily words like ‘pregnant’ and ‘stomach’. She was ‘not entirely approving of unmarried motherhood’ and she was always quick to warn young women about the risk of ‘unwise liaisons’. And she also had a Victorian fear of foreigners, a trait that she herself considered to be quite absurd.
‘A hundred years ago, you would certainly have been burned as a witch!’
Lucy Eyelesbarrow, 4.50 from Paddington
Nonetheless, Miss Marple’s cleverness and her strong sense of right and wrong were not lost on her family or any of her very wide circle of friends and acquaintances. It is therefore not surprising to learn that senior policemen and the Chief Constables of several counties also took Miss Marple very seriously, admiring her sharp eye for detail and her clear mind.
While she had resolved dozens of small, wholly unimportant village mysteries and even helped to unravel at least one earlier murder, her first ‘really big’ case was the killing of Colonel Lucius Protheroe, whose body was discovered in the vicarage at St Mary Mead.
‘There is no detective in England equal to a spinster lady of uncertain age with plenty of time on her hands.’
Rev. Leonard Clement, The Murder at the Vicarage
And after this case, Miss Marple would go on to investigate murders in other villages and in the Caribbean and London, on holidays made possible by her indulgent nephew. And while she would prevent crimes from happening she would also resolve mysteries that were many decades old.
Shrewd, inspired and inspiring, Miss Marple was in short the ‘complete detective service in the home’.
And she always will be.
Tony Medawar
‘She’s just the finest detective God ever made. Natural genius cultivated in a suitable soil. She can tell you what might have happened and what ought to have happened and even what actually did happen! And she can tell you why it happened!’
Sir Henry Clithering, A Murder is Announced
‘If people do not choose to lower their voices, one must assume that they are prepared to be overheard.’
At Bertram’s Hotel
‘Conversations are always dangerous, if you have something to hide.’
A Caribbean Mystery
‘Very nasty things go on in a village, I assure you … One has an opportunity of studying things there that one would never have in a town.’
They Do It with Mirrors
‘When we repeat a conversation, we don’t, as a rule, repeat the actual words; we put in some other words that seem to us to mean exactly the same thing.’
‘The Thumb Mark of St Peter’
‘People aren’t really foolish, you know. Not in villages.’
The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side
‘The English are rather odd that way. Even in war, so much prouder of their defeats and their retreats than of their victories … we always seem to be almost embarrassed by a victory – and treat it as though it weren’t quite nice to boast about it.’
They Do It with Mirrors
‘For an old lady like me who has all the time in the world, as you might say, it’s really expected of her that there should be a great deal of unnecessary talk.’
A Pocket Full of Rye
‘I expect someone overheard something, though, don’t you? … I mean, somebody always does.’
The Murder at the Vicarage
‘It is never easy to repeat a conversation and be entirely accurate in what the other party has said. One is always inclined to jump at what you think they meant. Then, afterwards, you put actual words into their mouths.’
A Caribbean Mystery
‘We old women always do snoop. It would be very odd and much more noticeable if I didn’t.’
A Murder is Announced
‘Gentlemen, when they’ve had a disappointment, want something stronger than tea.’
The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side
‘So like men – quite unable to see what’s going on under their eyes.’
4:50 from Paddington
‘The kind of woman who finds it very hard to make herself believe that anything at all extraordinary or out of the way could happen. She’s most unsuggestible, rather like granite.’
4:50 from Paddington
‘Women must stick together – one should, in an emergency, stand by one’s own sex.’
‘The Affair at the Bungalow’
‘There is no doubt about it that husbands do, very frequently, want to make away with their wives, though sometimes, of course, they only wish to make away with their wives and do not actually do so.’
The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side
‘Gentlemen … are frequently not as level-headed as they seem.’
The Body in the Library
‘Gentlemen never see through these things. And I’m afraid they often think we old women are – well, cats, to see things the way we do. But there it is. One does know a great deal about one’s own sex, unfortunately.’
‘The Four Suspects’
‘I’ve known many cases where the most beautiful and ethereal girls have shown next to no moral scruple – though, of course, gentlemen never wish to believe it of them.’
The Murder at the Vicarage
‘Gentlemen always make such excellent memoranda.’
The Murder at the Vicarage
‘If a man gets a formula that works – he won’t stop. He’ll go on.’
A Caribbean Mystery
‘A very nice woman. The kind that would so easily marry a bad lot. In fact, the sort of woman that would marry a murderer if she were ever given half a chance.’
Nemesis
‘She’s the kind of woman … that everyone likes. The kind of woman that could go on getting married again and again. I don’t mean a man’s woman – that’s quite different.’
The Body in the Library
‘The great thing in these cases is to keep an absolutely open mind. Most crimes, you see, are so absurdly simple.’
The Moving Finger
‘Any coincidence … is always worth
noticing. You can throw it away later if it is only a coincidence.’
Nemesis
‘When you only look at one side of a thing, you only see one side … But everything fits in perfectly well if you can only make up your mind what is reality and what is illusion.’
They Do It with Mirrors
‘It’s like looking for a needle in a haystack. If you stick your fingers in it long enough, you ought to come up with something – even if one does get pricked in the process.’
Nemesis
‘I know that in books it is always the most unlikely person. But I never find that rule applies in real life.’
The Murder at the Vicarage
‘If you disregard the smoke and come to the fire, you know where you are. You just come down to the actual facts of what happened.’
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