Agatha Christie’s Marple: The Life and Times of Miss Jane Marple. Anne Hart
had, for a short and interesting time, Hercule Poirot as a neighbour, a person whom Miss Marple herself apparently never met.
‘It is true, of course, that I have lived what is called a very uneventful life, but I have had a lot of experiences in solving different little problems that have arisen.’
—Miss Marple, ‘The Thumbmark of St Peter’
Attempting to pinpoint Miss Marple’s age at any particular time during the ensuing forty or so years is as baffling as any of her cases. If one begins, for example, with Agatha Christie’s statement ‘Miss Marple was born at the age of sixty-five to seventy’ in referring to her first appearance in The Murder at the Vicarage, published in 1930, and ends the sum with the certainty that her last recorded case was Nemesis, published in 1971, one is forced to conclude that Miss Marple was still going strong, albeit tottery, at anywhere from the age of one hundred and six to one hundred and eleven. Or if, for example, one pounces on Miss Marple’s and Carrie Louise Serrocold’s reminiscences in They Do It With Mirrors, published in 1952, about ‘events that had happened nearly half a century ago’ and carries them away to do arithmetic on the assumption that Miss Marple and Carrie Louise were sixteen at the time, one is led to believe that in the early 1950s, more than twenty years after The Murder at the Vicarage, Miss Marple is still only about sixty-five. There are a number of such conundrums in Marpelian literature, each of them as contradictory. ‘1 look every minute of my age!’ Miss Marple once said. But what was it as she said it? We never really know.
An even greater challenge is to try and reconcile chronologically the events in Miss Marple’s life with the order in which the accounts of her adventures were written and published. Putting aside for the moment her debut in The Murder at the Vicarage, the Miss Marple of some of the short stories published in the late 1930s appears to be very much older and Victorian than she ever will be again.
She had on black lace mittens, and a black lace cap surmounted the piled-up masses of her snowy hair. She was knitting – something white and soft and fleecy. Her faded blue eyes, benignant and kindly, surveyed her nephew and her nephew’s guests with gentle pleasure.
Contrast this picture with what Crump, the butler in A Pocket Full of Rye, saw some twenty years later.
… a tall, elderly lady wearing an old-fashioned tweed coat and skirt, a couple of scarves and a small felt hat with a bird’s wing. The old lady carried a capacious handbag and an aged but good-quality suitcase reposed by her feet.
To complicate things even more, the elderly, stay-at-home Miss Marple of the daguerreotypic black lace mittens and cap takes part in events that clearly happen well before the much later adventures of the old but comparatively younger lady of the tweed suit of the 1950s, and even before those of the brisk and spidery Miss Marple of the very first full-length book, The Murder at the Vicarage.
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