Agatha Christie’s Marple: The Life and Times of Miss Jane Marple. Anne Hart
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