Agatha Christie’s Marple. Anne Hart

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 the antithesis of the traditional vicar’s wife. She claimed to have chosen her middle-aged husband over a ‘cabinet minister, a baronet, a rich company promoter, three subalterns, and a n’er-do-well with attractive manners’ and never to have regretted her decision: ‘It’s so much nicer to be a secret and delightful sin to anybody than to be a feather in his cap.’ As a housekeeper she was a disaster. ‘Bad food and lots of dust and dead wasps is really nothing to make a fuss about,’ she once said, and, it must be admitted, none of these things seems to have deterred either the spinster brigade or the tennis-party set from making Griselda’s untidy drawing room their rallying point.

      Besides Miss Marple, the Clements had two other neighbours: Mrs Price Ridley and Dr Haydock. Mrs Price Ridley was a ‘rich and dictatorial widow’ whose immaculate house stood on the other side of the vicarage wall. Though not a spinster, she was an important member of the tea-and-scandal group and, to the Vicar’s secret regret, a devout churchgoer. On the other side of the Clements lived Dr Haydock, the physician and police surgeon. ‘Haydock is the best fellow I know,’ wrote the Vicar, and Colonel Melchett said of him, ‘He’s a very sound fellow in police work. If he says a thing, it’s so.’

      From time to time strange birds of passage alighted in St Mary Mead, causing no end of a stir. Mention has been made of the bogus archaeologist who came to dig in the grounds of Old Hall. Other examples of this phenomenon were Mrs Spenlow, a lady with a past, who was found on her hearthrug, strangled by a tape measure, shortly after coming to live in St Mary Mead; Rex Stanford, an inoffensive young architect who was framed for a murder within a month of his arrival; and flamboyant Basil Blake, who came down to live in one of the sham Tudor houses on the new building estate, bringing with him noisy weekend guests and a permanently resident platinum blonde.

      Two other strangers who set the dovecotes fluttering, and whose cottages appear on The Murder at the Vicarage map, were Lawrence Redding and Mrs Lestrange.

      ‘He’s a very good-looking young fellow,’ said Miss Wetherby of Lawrence Redding. ‘But loose,’ replied Miss Hartnell. ‘Bound to be. An artist! Paris! Models! The Altogether!’ The Vicar kindly lent his garden shed as a studio to this young artist, and in it all Miss Hartnell’s worst prophecies were realized. But no one, not even Miss Marple, could learn much about the appropriately named Mrs Lestrange, and if her ex-husband had not died under mysterious circumstances, her secrets would probably have been safe to this day.

      Little Gates, Mrs Lestrange’s house, had formerly belonged to a retired Anglo-Indian colonel, a far more familiar type of newcomer. Indeed, there were a number of collections of brass tables and Burmese idols scattered around St Mary Mead: Major Vaughan at The Larches, for example, and Colonel Wright at Simla Lodge. Bearers, tigers, chota hazri, safari and Kikuyu. became familiar words. But these soldierly old boys and their wives were never regarded as strangers (i.e. primary criminal suspects). Armed with letters of introduction and an old regimental tie, the retired general or commander who came to live in St Mary Mead was welcomed as ‘one of us.’

      Two other important people in St Mary Mead were the bank manager and the solicitor. In the early days the solicitor was Mr Petherick, ‘a dried-up little man with eye-glasses which he looked over and not through.’ After his death, his son carried on the family business, but for some reason we learn little of him or of Mr Wells, his successor, except that young Ronnie Wells left St Mary Mead for East Africa to start a series of cargo boats on the lakes and lost all his money in the venture.

      The St Mary Mead branch of Middleton’s bank stood at 132 High Street. ‘Do you remember Joan Croft, Bunch?’ Miss Marple once asked a goddaughter. ‘Used to stalk about smoking a cigar or a pipe. We had a Bank hold-up once, and Joan Croft was in the Bank at the time. She knocked the man down and took his revolver away from him. She was congratulated on her courage by the Bench.’ Alas, this is all we ever learn of Joan Croft.

      Over the years Miss Marple reminisced about several different bank managers and their families. There was Mr Hodgson, who ‘went on a cruise and married a woman young enough to be his daughter. No idea of where she came from.’ There was Mr Eade, ‘a very conservative man – but perhaps a little too fond of money.’ Young Thomas Eade, his son, turned out to be a bit of a black sheep and ended up in the West Indies. ‘He came home when his father died and inherited quite a lot of money. So nice for him.’ And there was Mr Emmett, who had married beneath him with the unfortunate result that his wife ‘was in a position of great loneliness since she could not, of course, associate with the wives of the trades people.’

      Miss Marple no doubt produced this particular ‘of course’ with her head ‘a little on one side looking like an amiable cockatoo,’ for there it was, the undeniable fact that St Mary Mead was divided into two worlds, with an overall consensus that things went much more comfortably if everyone stuck to the one in which the Good Lord had caused them to be born. Which brings us to that section of the village map marked ‘Shops and Small Houses’ and the people who lived and worked in them.

      The fishmonger’s, which stood on the High Street overlooking the vicarage road, appears to have been the principal clearinghouse for village information. Over the years this establishment had several different shop assistants and delivery boys, all of whom were called Fred. It becomes confusing to sort out all these young Freds, but we can be sure that at least two of them were different people – Fred Jackson in The Murder at the Vicarage and Fred Tyler, recalled by Miss Marple in A Murder Is Announced. The main function of these young men seems to have been to court girls and distribute the news of the latest felony, along with the kippers and herrings, around the village. In ‘Tape-Measure Murder,’ Miss Marple uttered two words, ‘The fish,’ in reply to Constable Palk’s demand of how, within half an hour of the discovery of the body, she had learned of a murder. Many years later, in A Pocket Full of Rye, the incumbent Fred of that day was to be the innocent cause of Miss Marple’s maid, Gladys, leaving the village for another post and a dreadful fate. One cannot help but hope that she had a few moments of happiness before realizing young Fred was not really interested – perhaps in the mysterious room over the fishmonger’s, which Miss Wetherby once roguishly hinted about to the Vicar. ‘I now know,’ he wrote resignedly, ‘where maids go on their days out.’

      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