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Revised edition published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2019

Copyright © Anne Hart 1985

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Source ISBN: 9780008340285

Ebook Edition © May 2019 ISBN: 9780007396566

Version: 2019-04-06

DEDICATION

For a very dear aunt,

Anita Elliott Baird,

whom Miss Marple would have

enjoyed knowing

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Preface

1 St Mary Mead

2 Miss Marple’s Earlier Life

3 Miss Marple’s Career Begins

4 The 1930s

5 Postwar Events

6 The Four Last Cases

7 The Essential Miss Marple

8 A Visit to Miss Marple

9 Miss Marple at Home

10 Miss Marple at Large

11 ‘My Nephew, the Author’ and Other Relatives and Friends

12 Little Maids All In a Row

13 Miss Marple as Sleuth

A Miss Marple Bibliography

Miss Marple Short Stories

Miss Marple on Stage, Film, TV and Radio

Keep Reading

About the Author

Also by Anne Hart

About the Publisher

PREFACE

It has been a great pleasure to write this biography of Agatha Christie’s beloved and resilient Miss Marple, the best known of a notable group of women who have played leading roles in detective fiction. Of course, not a word of this book would have been written had not a benevolent genius created Miss Marple in the first place, and I am immensely grateful to Rosalind Hicks, Agatha Christie’s daughter, for giving her kind approval for my use of her mother’s writing in this way.

Unlike other biographers, I cannot claim to have unearthed new material. Everything we know of Miss Marple is contained in the twelve books and twenty short stories devoted to her remarkable sleuthing. To search through these books and stories, not for murderers but for clues to Miss Marple herself, is the aim of this biography. I hope its readers will enjoy reading it as much as I have enjoyed writing it. Together we are indebted to the incomparable Agatha Christie.

I am grateful to a number of people who have encouraged me along the way. I would particularly like to thank Susan Hart, Nancy Grenville, David Grenville, and Percy Janes for their helpful advice on the manuscript, and June Mescia, my editor, for her suggestions and good judgment.

ANNE HART

1 ST MARY MEAD

For me, as for many others, the reading of detective stories is an addiction like tobacco or alcohol … the story must conform to certain formulas (I find it very difficult, for example, to read one that is not set in rural England).

—W. H. Auden, ‘The Guilty Vicarage’

‘Give me a nice cup of tea, Aunt Jane, with some thin bread and butter and soothe me with your earliest remembrances of St Mary Mead.’

—Inspector Craddock, THE MIRROR CRACK’D FROM SIDE TO SIDE

The pretty village of St Mary Mead will be forever known as the home of Miss Jane Marple, that wonderful sleuth whose creator so cleverly, and for so many years, led us down the garden path. It is impossible, indeed, to imagine St Mary Mead without Miss Marple or Miss Marple without St Mary Mead; it was the archetypal English village created just for her. That for almost fifty years its pleasant homes and byways were so frequently the scenes of crimes has never detracted in the least from its essential cosiness and charm. Before fully introducing Miss Marple, it is first necessary to introduce St Mary Mead.

St Mary Mead lies in the home county of Downshire (occasionally called Radfordshire) and is about twenty-five miles south of London and twelve miles equidistant from Market Basing and the coast at Loomouth.* Danemouth, a fashionable watering place also on the coast, is about eighteen miles from the county town of Much Benham and it, in turn, is two miles from St Mary Mead.†

Of its history and the origins of its name we know nothing. It is true that a well-known archaeologist once came down to St Mary Mead to excavate an ancient barrow in the grounds of Old Hall, but the subsequent discovery that he was merely an impostor out to steal Colonel Protheroe’s Georgian trencher salts and Charles the Second tazza appears to have ended a brief flurry of interest in village antiquities. A concern for local history cannot be found listed as an activity in St Mary Mead; day-to-day affairs and distractions seem to have left its inhabitants with little time to greet tourists or dwell on any but the most recent events.

An interesting map of St Mary Mead is to be found in that useful early guide, The Murder at the Vicarage. A few additions – principally signposts to Gossington Hall and Much Benham, and an indication of the new Development – have been added to bring the geography of the village up to date. As can be seen from this map, St Mary Mead is a small village whose shops and houses straggle comfortably along the High Street from the Railway Station at one end to the Blue Boar at the other. Three houses, including the vicarage, face on to a side road, and in this area are several footpaths and lanes leading to and from the neighbouring woods and fields. Old Hall, one of the two ‘big houses’ of St Mary Mead, can be approached by one of these. The other big house, Gossington Hall, lies about a mile and a quarter along the Lansham Road to the northeast. To reach it one passes a new building estate boasting a flourish of half-timbered, sham Tudor houses rejoicing in ‘distorted rustic’ gates and names such as ‘Chatsworth’. This new building estate, laid out in the late 1920s, should not be confused with the more plebeian Development, whose many houses and television masts sprang up in the early 1960s, obliterating the pleasant meadows where Fanner Giles’s cows once used to graze.

Fortunately these newer areas are tucked well away from the High Street and out of view. If one drove through St Mary Mead today, it would present much the same aspect as it did forty or fifty years ago. It is regrettable, of course, that the fishmonger has chosen to install an unsightly plate-glass window, and the gleaming new supermarket, which replaced the basket shop, remains 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 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 it was Mr Murdoch who seems to have acquired a rather amorous reputation, though ‘some people said it was just gossip, and that Mr Murdoch himself liked to encourage the rumours!’

Mr Golden, the baker, had a van as well as a delivery boy; in ‘The Case of the Caretaker’ its door was taken off to serve as a stretcher for the murder victim. Mr Golden also had an ambitious daughter, Jessie, who left St Mary Mead to work as a nursery governess and married the son of the house, who was home on leave from India.

Barnes, the grocer, was a favourite of the old guard and, much to Miss Marple’s relief, his shop was to remain unchanged for the next thirty years. ‘So obliging, comfortable chairs to sit in by the counter, and cosy discussions as to cuts of bacon, and varieties of cheese.’ The greengrocer, however, was another story. In The Murder at the Vicarage we find that he was ‘not behaving at all nicely with the chemist’s wife,’ which was not surprising, considering that the chemist’s shop always seemed to be in a state of marital upheaval.

The chemist, whose wife enjoyed the attentions of the greengrocer, rejoiced in the name of Cherubim. One of Mr Cherubim’s predecessors, a Mr Badger, was recalled by Miss Marple in The Body in the Library. He ‘made a lot of fuss over the young lady who worked in his cosmetics section. Told his wife they must look on her as a daughter and have her live in the house.’ So infatuated did Mr Badger become that he spent a lot of his savings on a diamond bracelet and radio-gramophone for the girl, until he discovered that she was carrying on with another man. Despite this setback Mr Badger seems to have gone from strength to strength, for we next hear of him as a supposed widower in ‘The Herb of Death’ with:

‘… a very young housekeeper – young enough to be not only his daughter but his granddaughter. Not a word to anyone, and his family, a lot of nephews and nieces, full of expectations. And when he died, would you believe it, he’d been secretly married to her for two years?’

The wool shop was run by Mrs Cray, who was ‘devoted to her son, spoilt him, of course. He got in with a very queer lot.’ The paper shop was run by Mrs Pusey, whose nephew ‘brought home stuff he’d stolen and got her to dispose of it … And when the police came round and started asking questions, he tried to bash her on the head.’ Longdon’s, the draper’s, was where Miss Marple had her curtains made up; Mrs Jameson, who ‘turned you out with a nice firm perm,’ did her hair; and Miss Politt, who lived above the post office and was a principal in ‘Tape-Measure Murder,’ was her dressmaker.

St Mary Mead also had a builder named Cargill who ‘bluffed a lot of people into having things done to their houses they never meant to do’; an automobile mechanic named Jenkins who was none too honest over batteries; and a vet, Mr Quinton, whose peccadilloes, if any, have gone unrecorded.

One of the most venerable institutions in the village was Inch’s Taxi Service. It had been started by Mr Inch many years before in the days of horse and cab and, though it had long since graduated to motorcars and other owners, it always retained the name of Inch. The older ladies of St Mary Mead invariably referred to their journeys by taxi as ‘going somewhere “in Inch”, as though they were Jonah and Inch was a whale.’

The post office stood at the crossroads on a corner opposite the church. The postman was absent-minded and so was the postmistress. Griselda once teased her husband:

‘Oh! Len, you adore me. Do you remember that day when I stayed up in town and sent you a wire you never got because the postmistress’s sister was having twins and she forgot to send it round? The state you got into, and you telephoned Scotland Yard and made the most frightful fuss.’

Wrote the Vicar gloomily, ‘There are things one hates being reminded of.’

The afternoon arrival, more or less precisely at two-thirty, of the Much Benham bus at the post office was one of the events of the day in St Mary Mead. Mrs Blade, the postmistress, could be counted on to hurry out to meet it, thus leaving the public telephone unattended for some four minutes, an important fact that helped Miss Marple solve the ‘Tape-Measure Murder:’

On the other side of the crossroads stood the village pub, the Blue Boar. The first landlord we learn of was Joe Bucknell. ‘Such a to-do about his daughter carrying on with young Bailey,’ Miss Marple once recalled. ‘And all the time it was that minx of a wife of his.’ Just when the Bucknells left St Mary Mead is uncertain, but their most memorable successors were the Emmotts. Tom Emmott, ‘a big burly man of middle age with a shifty eye and a truculent jaw,’ was a bit of a blackguard in Colonel Melchett’s opinion. Like Joe Bucknell, he had family problems. His pretty, wayward daughter, Rose, came to an untimely end in the river just below the Mill.

The Blue Boar, like so many other landmarks in St Mary Mead, had some atypical uses. It was a good place to have been seen drinking in, for example, at the moment a murder was supposed to have taken place. It was a comfortable home away from home for visiting chief constables and Scotland Yard inspectors. (‘The Blue Boar gives you a first-rate meal of the joint-and-two-vegetable type,’. the Vicar once told Colonel Melchett wistfully.) When the need arose, it was the most appropriate place in St Mary Mead in which to hold an inquest.

The railway station stood at the opposite end of the village on the branch line to Much Benham. Feelings could run high, and alibis could be overturned, if the trains ran late, a not unusual occurrence. To go up to London (the Thursday cheap return was the favourite excursion), one could catch the morning train or have an early lunch and travel by the 12:15. In either case one had to change at the junction at Much Benham. The evening 6:50 was a popular train on which to come home. If one returned after midnight to find the last train on the branch line to St Mary Mead gone, one could take a taxi from Much Benham – but not, one hopes, to one’s death, as did poor Giuseppe, the Italian butler at Gossington Hall.

To be the resident constable at the St Mary Mead police station must have been an interesting posting. Was it vied for, perhaps, as an important advancement, or meted out as a punishment, like being sent to the Russian Front? Whatever the case, Constable Hurst of The Murder at the Vicarage was described as looking ‘very important but slightly worried,’ and Constable Palk of ‘Tape-Measure Murder’ and The Body in the Library seems to have developed a nervous habit of sucking his moustache. One would have thought, looking back, that one of the advantages of the position would have been the opportunity of working closely with Miss Marple, but, ungratefully enough, the first place these constables invariably seemed to have turned for help was the county police headquarters in Much Benham, presided over by Miss Marple’s old antagonist, Inspector Slack. ‘Inspector Slack? Police Constable Palk here. A report has just come in that the body of a young woman was discovered this morning at seven-fifteen’ – and the hunt would be up, and the big guns would start to arrive.

St Mary Mead came into Much Benham’s domain in many other ways as well. It was there that Colonel Melchett, the county’s chief constable, and Dr Roberts, the coroner, had their offices; it was there, at the mortuary, that one went to view unidentified bodies (brandy was available); it was there, if one was taken ill or met with an accident, that one was rushed to the hospital; it was there, if one was Colonel Bantry, that one went to meetings of the Conservative Association; it was there, if one was Mrs Price Ridley, that one bought one’s formidable hats; it was there, if one had old silver to appraise, that one went to ‘a very good man’; it was there, if one was Griselda, that one went secretly to purchase books on Mother-Lore (only to be discovered in the act of doing so by Miss Marple). ‘Our adjoining town’ the villagers called it, but Much Benham, larger and only two miles away, must have privately regarded St Mary Mead as a potential, if somewhat troublesome, suburb.

Besides popping over to Much Benham, running up to London, calling in for tea, dropping by the Blue Boar, or lending a hand with the parish activities, what else did the inhabitants of St Mary Mead do with their apparently plentiful leisure time? If one was so inclined, one could go to the cinema, attend the Bingo Club, or play ‘village bridge’. If one was energetic, one could patronize the golf links or play tennis. If one was more sedentary, one could garden, bird watch, or visit the lending library. But above all, if one was an inhabitant of St Mary Mead, much of one’s time was taken up by crime – as either a perpetrator, victim, or spectator thereof – for it is a fact that, over the years, the number of crimes, particularly murders, committed within the borders of this one small English village appears to have reached an extraordinarily high level in proportion to its modest size.

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 with decimals and English literature,’ but adds, wryly, ‘I was, I think, well educated for the standard of my day. My sister and I had a German governess – a Fräulein. A very sentimental creature. She taught us the language of flowers.’ This mild disrespect for the kind of education girls of her time received was once confided to, of all people, her old enemy, Inspector Slack:

‘So difficult, you know, to explain oneself, don’t you think? … not having been educated in the modern style – just a governess, you know, who taught one the dates of the Kings of England and General Knowledge … Discursive, you know, but not teaching one to keep to the point.’

To her great ally, Inspector Craddock, when he spoke admiringly of the women of her generation, she replied:

‘I’m sure, my dear boy, you would find the young lady of the type you refer to as a very inadequate helpmeet nowadays. Young ladies were not encouraged to be intellectual and very few of them had university degrees or any kind of academic distinction.’

There were many dos and don’ts: ‘Miss Marple sat very upright because she had been taught to use a back-board as a girl’; ‘In my young days it was considered to be very bad manners to take medicines with one’s meals. It was on a par with blowing your nose at the dinner table’; ‘When I was a girl, Inspector, nobody ever mentioned the word stomach.’

But there were useful compensations: riddles and Mother Goose rhymes in early childhood, playing with disappearing ink, conjuring tricks (‘It was the trick of the Lady Sawn in Half that made me think of it,’ she was to say many years later to a bemused Inspector Curry), and visits to Madame Tussaud’s.

Who were her parents, and where did they live? We are never told exactly, but a distinctly clerical pattern, almost Mafia-like in its family connections, seems to emerge. Miss Marple was, we do know, a ‘pink and white English girl from a Cathedral Close’ and probably, therefore, the daughter of a canon or the dean of a cathedral. One of the few mentions of her father was of him bringing home bronzes purchased at the Paris Exhibition. We are also given a glimpse of Miss Marple’s mother and grandmother in Paris:

‘We went to have tea at the Elysée Hotel. And my grandmother looked round, and she said suddenly, “Clara, I do believe I am the only woman here in a bonnet!” And she was, too! When she got home she packed up all her bonnets, and her beaded mantles too – and sent them off.’

It is clear that these two, her mother and grandmother, undertook to initiate Miss Marple at an early age into the obligations and mysteries of being a lady. ‘To wit: that a true lady can neither be shocked nor surprised’; that ‘a gentlewoman should always be able to control herself in public, however much she may give way in private’; and, above all, that a lady must always do her duty: ‘Port wine jelly and calf’s head broth taken to the sick. My mother used to do it.’

In later years Miss Marple was to speak of ‘the old days, with all the big family reunions.’ At such gatherings there were no doubt assembled her aunts: her Great Aunt Fanny, for example, who told Miss Marple when she was sixteen that ‘young people think the old people are fools – but the old people know the young people are fools!’; her Aunt Helen who, perhaps because she had never been to Paris, would probably arrive wearing a bonnet and what she always called her ‘black poplin’ mantle; the survivor aunt, whose name we do not know, who had been shipwrecked on five different occasions; and the detective aunt, no doubt a significant early model, who could smell when people told lies, because ‘their noses twitched, she said, and then the smell came.’

Also arriving would be the uncles: Great Uncle Thomas, the retired admiral, who lived in a handsome terrace in Richmond; Uncle Henry, the bachelor, described on one occasion as ‘a man of unusual self-control,’ and on another as someone who was given to temper tantrums over food and a habit of keeping a great deal of money hidden in his library behind volumes of sermons. And then would come the canons: the uncle who was a canon of Chichester Cathedral, and Uncle Thomas, who was a canon of Ely.

Her cousins, Anthony and Gordon, would probably be there as well. ‘Whatever Anthony did always went right for him, and with poor Gordon it was just the other way about; race horses went lame, and stocks went down.’ Cousin Fanny Godfrey, who stuttered, would no doubt be present, and perhaps Cousin Ethel, Lady Merridew, who lived in style in Lowndes Square. Many years later Miss Marple was to gaze upon a painful scene – a vast skyscraper of modern design built upon the site where Lady Merridew’s house once stood. ‘There must be progress I suppose,’ mused Miss Marple. ‘If Cousin Ethel knew, she’d turn in her grave, I’m sure.’

At fourteen Miss Marple was given a great treat – a visit to London with her Aunt Helen and Uncle Thomas, the Canon of Ely, to stay At Bertram’s Hotel. Forever after, Bertram’s, ‘dignified, unostentatious and quietly expensive,’ was to remain in Miss Marple’s mind as the ultimate holiday. It was probably during a visit such as this that a pilgrimage was made across Battersea Bridge to visit a retired governess, Miss Ledbury, who lived at Princes Terrace Mansions, and it was almost certainly the occasion for one of her Aunt Helen’s memorable expeditions, niece in tow, to the grocery department of the Army & Navy Stores, there to seek out ‘our special man’ from whom to order, in an ensuing leisurely hour,

every conceivable grocery that could be purchased and stored up for future use. Christmas was provided for, and there was even a far-off look towards Easter. The young Jane had fidgeted somewhat, and been told to go and look at the glass department by way of amusement … Having had a thoroughly pleasant morning, Aunt Helen would say in the playful manner of those times ‘And how would a little girl feel about some luncheon.’ Whereupon they went up in the lift to the fourth floor and had luncheon which always finished with a strawberry ice.

To round off her education, Miss Marple was sent, at about the age of sixteen, to school in Florence. There she met two American girls, Ruth and Carrie Louise Martin, ‘exciting to the English girl because of their quaint ways of speech and their forthright manner and vitality.’ They were to become her lifelong friends. ‘In spite of all my aches and pains,’ Carrie Louise was to say to Miss Marple nearly fifty years later, ‘it seems only a few months ago that we were at Florence. Do you remember Fräulein Schweich and her boots?’

‘Of course it was the fashion when we were young to have ideals,’ Carrie’s sister, Ruth, once said to Miss Marple.

‘We all had them, it was the proper thing for young girls. You were going to nurse lepers, Jane, and I was going to be a nun. One gets over all that nonsense. Marriage, I suppose one might say, knocks it out of one. Still, taking it by and large, I haven’t done badly out of marriage.’

Neither did Carrie Louise. Between them the two sisters were to acquire six husbands and a great deal of wealth. It can hardly be said that Miss Marple followed their examples.

Though she herself did not marry and was destined, in fact, to become the archetypal village spinster, Miss Marple had her own salad days and a number of beaux. In old age she was to recall them with indulgence:

Jane Marple, that pink and white eager young girl … Such a silly girl in many ways … now who was that very unsuitable young man whose name – oh dear, she couldn’t even remember it now! How wise her mother had been to nip that friendship so firmly in the bud. She had come across him years later – and really he was quite dreadful! At the time she had cried herself to sleep for at least a week!

And there was:

A young man she had met at a croquet party. He had seemed so nice – rather gay, almost Bohemian in his views. And then he had been unexpectedly warmly welcomed by her father. He had been suitable, eligible; he had been asked freely to the house more than once, and Miss Marple had found that, after all, he was dull. Very dull.

And she had enjoyed dancing. In old age, holidaying in the Caribbean, she would have preferred ‘the muted strains of the “Blue Danube”,’ though she had to confess that watching the local dancing had its merits as well: ‘She liked the shuffling feet and the rhythmic sway of the bodies.’ Rather more comfortable, perhaps, than

‘dancing with a man dressed as a brigand chief when I was a young girl. He had five kinds of knives and daggers, and I can’t tell you how awkward and uncomfortable it was for his partner.’

In later years, when she was in her sixties, seventies, and eighties, Miss Marple occasionally made such references to her girlhood, but on no recorded occasion did she ever refer directly to all the other years between. We know nothing of her life as a young woman, her middle age, or how she came to her appointed place as the resident sleuth of St Mary Mead. One would like to speculate, to imagine something vaguely heroic, perhaps, but it is all explained as much as it will ever be, I suspect, by scattered references to home nursing. ‘I am used to sick people,’ she once said. ‘I have had a great deal to do with them in my time.’ On another occasion we are told: ‘Long experience of nursing made Miss Marple almost automatically straighten the sheet and tuck it under the mattress on her side of the bed.’

‘Long experience of nursing …’ From this single phrase emerges a picture of the unmarried daughter, the once pink-and-white eager girl, who stayed at home in some provincial town to gradually become, as the years passed, the companion and nurse of her parents in their old age. She also became, as we shall see, the real or honorary favourite aunt – sometimes doting, sometimes vinegary – of a number of people.

Few would regard all this as an exciting life, but nowhere is there any hint that Miss Marple considered herself a martyr. She did, however, once confide to a lonely person:

‘I know what you mean … One is alone when the last one who remembers is gone. I have nephews and nieces and kind friends – but there’s no one who belongs to the old days. I’ve been alone for quite a long time now.’

Behold her, then: Miss Jane Marple, her parents dead, her sister dead, her jolly aunts and uncles long gone to their proper rest. She is living alone in genteel and thrifty old age in the quiet village of St Mary Mead, the possessor of a small but pretty Victorian house no doubt purchased from a modest inheritance left her some years before by her dear parents.

It is the 1930s – or is it the 1920s? – and she is about to embark on an amazing career.

It is interesting to recall that Caroline Sheppard, Miss Marple’s progenitor, had, for a short and interesting time, Hercule Poirot as a neighbour, a person whom Miss Marple herself apparently never met.