Agatha Christie’s Marple. Anne Hart

      Consider the record. A search through Marpelian literature will reveal that over a period of some forty years, there occurred in St Mary Mead a total of sixteen murders – five by poisoning, two by shooting, two by drowning, two by strangling, and five by unidentified means – plus four attempts at murder by poisoning, smothering, and bashing on the head. In the same period there occurred five robberies, eight embezzlements, two series of blackmailing, several illegal impersonations, a case or two of poaching, and a number of crank phone calls, poison-pen letters, and criminal libels. Faced with these statistics, one cannot help but count St Mary Mead fortunate in having had, in the same period of time, a resident sleuth of the stature of Miss Marple. Without her indomitable presence, where would it all have ended? Characteristically, she herself took a modest view of her accomplishments: ‘Very nasty things go on in a village, I assure you,’ she once murmured. ‘One has an opportunity of studying things there that one would never have in town.’

      Thus St Mary Mead about the year 1935. Periodically, in the years to follow, Miss Marple would be heard to complain that ‘St Mary Mead was not the place it had been,’ but to revisit it in the fifties, sixties, and seventies was to find many of its inhabitants and institutions older but reassuringly unchanged. Miss Wetherby, alas, ‘had passed on and her house was now inhabited by the bank manager and his family, having been given a face-lift by the painting of doors and windows a bright royal blue,’ and Mrs Price Ridley had faded from the scene, but Miss Hartnell’s stentorian voice was still to be heard ‘fighting progress to the last gasp,’ and Dr Haydock, now elderly and semi-retired, still called upon Miss Marple to prescribe a ‘nice juicy murder’ as her best tonic. Though Mrs Jameson, the hairdresser, ‘had steeled herself to going as far in the cause of progress as to repaint her sign and call herself “DIANE. HAIR STYLIST.” … the shop remained much as before and catered in much the same way to the needs of the clients,’ while elsewhere on the High Street, the most recent scandal concerning the chemist’s wife continued to hold the village’s attention. Old ladies could still depend on faithful Inch, and while there were new faces at the St Mary Mead and Much Benham police stations, their owners seemed as incapable of preventing the less attractive members of the community from murdering or being murdered as had their predecessors.

      Nevertheless, some real changes did occur in St Mary Mead in those postwar decades: the building of the new Development, for example, and the wave of outsiders it brought with it; the alterations to the High Street; the arrival of a glittering new supermarket; and the rather frightening proximity of an airfield (a jet plane once broke the sound barrier and two windows in Miss Marple’s greenhouse at the same time). All these were radical departures from the past. Next door to Miss Marple, an even more profound change occurred with the departure of the Clements and the arrival of a new, and even more absent-minded, vicar.

      Perhaps the most interesting changes of all were the ones that took place at Gossington Hall. Following the death of Colonel Bantry, Mrs Bantry, who became as comfortable and cheerful a widow as she had been a wife, sold Gossington Hall, keeping the East Lodge for herself. Cast adrift, Gossington Hall had a checkered career reminiscent of Old Hall in the 1930s. First run as an unsuccessful guest house, it was then

      bought by four people who had shared it as four roughly divided flats and subsequently quarrelled. Finally the Ministry of Health had bought it for some obscure purpose for which they eventually did not want it.

      The next owner was far more exciting, easily the most glamorous outsider ever to alight in St Mary Mead. A film star of international repute, Marina Gregg arrived in the village with her fifth husband and a retinue of assorted eccentrics to live in a fabulously renovated Gossington Hall. Tarted up, it once again proved a splendid place for bodies. Three, possibly four, sensational killings in quick succession were enough to set a village, even one as experienced as St Mary Mead, completely agog.

      And what of St Mary Mead today? Does an Arab sheik now preside over the palm court and pool at Gossington Hall? If so, what is his imminent fate? As Development follows Development, will St Mary Mead disappear entirely into the boundaries of an unsuspecting Much Benham? Has a judicial inquiry been appointed, or a Royal Commission struck, to investigate the uncontrollable rise in village crime since the sad departure of its resident Nemesis?

      ‘I regard St Mary Mead as a stagnant pool,’ Miss Marple’s sophisticated young nephew once remarked.

      ‘That is really not a very good simile, dear Raymond,’ his aunt replied briskly. ‘Nothing, I believe, is so full of life under the microscope as a drop of water from a stagnant pool.’

* A charming country town and a favourite haunt during the 1920s and 1930s of a well-known contemporary of Miss Marple’s, M. Hercule Poirot. See Dumb Witness and ‘The Market Basing Mystery’ (in Poirot’s Early Cases).

† At risk of further confusing the reader, it should be added that Miss Marple’s St Mary Mead is not the village of the same name described in The Mystery of the Blue Train. That St Mary Mead is in Kent.

       2 MISS MARPLE’S EARLIER LIFE

      ‘I live very quietly in the country, you see.’

      —Miss Marple, NEMESIS

      Miss Marple was born at the age of sixty-five to seventy – which, as with Poirot, proved most unfortunate, because she was going to have to last a long time in my life,’ wrote Agatha Christie in her autobiography. Embryonically, Miss Marple may have had some early relationship to Caroline, the doctor’s sister in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, which was published four years before the first appearance of Miss Marple. Of Caroline, Dr Sheppard said:

      ‘The motto of the mongoose family, so Mr Kipling tells us, is: “Go and find out.” If Caroline ever adopts a crest, I should certainly suggest a mongoose rampant. One might omit the first part of the motto. Caroline can do any amount of finding out by sitting placidly at home. I don’t know how she manages it, but there it is.’

Agatha Christie was fond of Caroline, and when, in an adaptation of Roger Ackroyd to the stage, she was replaced by a young, attractive girl, she resented her removal very much: ‘I liked the part she played in village life … I think at that moment, in St Mary Mead, though I did not yet know it, Miss Marple was born.’*

      Agatha Christie’s grandmother and her friends provided further inspiration. Miss Marple was, in Agatha Christie’s words,

      the sort of old lady who would have been rather like some of my grandmother’s Ealing cronies – old ladies whom I have met in so many villages where I have gone to stay as a girl. 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.

      Despite Miss Marple’s first appearance as a detective at the age of sixty-five or thereabouts, it is possible to piece together something of her childhood and girlhood from clues she occasionally dropped in conversation during her extraordinarily long old age. Characteristically, she had from the beginning an excellent memory: ‘I’ve always remembered the mauve irises on my nursery walls and yet I believe it was re-papered when I was only three.’ On this wallpaper, over her bed, was pinned a prophetic text: Ask and you shall receive.

      There was probably only one other child in the nursery, a sister, and the two little girls seem to have spent the sort of strict, sheltered, governess-run lives familiar to us from the first chapters of many Victorian autobiographies.

      There are reports of long hours in the schoolroom. In old age Miss Marple knew very well how hard it was for youth to picture her ‘young and pigtailed and struggling