So a while ago, Amazon had a good deal on the whole Christie/Marple collection for Kindle. Of course I jumped on it, because I adore Agatha Christie, and particularly her Marple books. She’s just such a twinkly old lady (so says Agatha, and so says I).
I think the omnibus goes in order, so this story is the actual first appearance of Miss Marple. We’re introduced to her in her lovely village of Saint Mary Mead, which is a hotbed of all manner of naughtiness, according to Miss Marple. The most hated person there is Colonel Lucius Protheroe. He’s a loudmouth and an all-around jerk. Not nice to his kid, not nice to his (2nd, much younger) wife, and a real thorn in the vicar’s side.
He’s supposed to meet the vicar one night, when the vic is called away to a sick parishoner’s bedside. Mrs. Vicar is out of the house, but the maid shows him to the study so he can wait. When the vicar comes home, there’s a dead man on his desk. It’s pretty clear that the death is not suicide, so who could have murdered this man? There are plenty of people who wanted to, but motive isn’t everything.
The local police begin to investigate, and the nice old next door neighbor lady (with keen eyesight and insight) offers some information and hints, and may be doing a little sleuthing on her own. Overall, the story is an entertaining introduction to one of the best-loved (at least in my house) amateur detectives of all time.
Brace yourselves, because I’ll be working my way through the entire Marple oeuvre. Minus the ones I’ve already reviewed, of course.
I have to admit, I don’t think I’ve read ANY Agatha Christie! How can that be? I might have read one a lonnnng time ago, but I can’t remember which.
I read a lot of so-called “cozy” mysteries, so I think I read all of Agatha Christie when I was young. But my favorite was never any of either the Poirot or Marple stories; it was a book with horrifyingly problematic race issues that’s been retitled “And Then There Were None.” (Actually, it’s been long enough since I read it that I don’t know if there were specific problematic race elements other than the original title and the rhyme used within.)
And my other favorite was her character Mr. Harley Quin.
The mystery writer Robert Barnard mentioned something I’ve always admired about Christie and that sets her apart from the other female mystery writers of her era including Dorothy Sayers, Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh and Patricia Wentworth (whose character Miss Silver was a shameless ripoff of Miss Marple). The work of these other writers will always feature a likeable, attractive and usually young hero and heroine, around whom a romance usually develops and who remain above suspicion, at least in the readers’s eyes. Even thought they may be accused of a crime, from the moment we meet them we can tell that our author doesn’t want anything bad to happen to these two and that they’ll be vindicated in the end. But for Christie, the murderer is just as likely to be this hero or heroine as it is to be any of the other characters, in fact one of the tricks that she has up her sleeve is to lure us into the cozy assumption that these characters are our stock blameless romantic young couple, only to find that we are very mistaken (John Dickson Carr liked to do this as well). Another thing that has contributed to Christie’s longevity after her contemporaries have faded is that Marple and Poirot are comparatively un-class-conscious, in the tradition of Sherlock Holmes who treated everyone from dukes to factory workers in the same brusque manner. Christie isn’t very kind about the many servants whom her detectives interview, treating them all as idiots, but she is also refreshingly unkind about the aristocracy, with none of the nauseating sucking-up of Sayers, Allingham, Marsh et al. As I recall Allingham tried to one-up Sayers’ aristocratic detective Lord Peter by hinting that her guy was related to royalty, and rarely did a detective conduct an interview with an aristocrat in one of these writers’ works without hints that the policeman should have used the tradesman’s entrance. But Marple as an elderly woman and Poirot as a foreigner are outsiders, slightly comic ones at that, and this gives them the freedom to snoop and question that wouldn’t come as easily to someone who fit more neatly into a social category. It’s no surprise that Tommy and Tuppence, a conventional middle-class couple, aren’t nearly as popular as Marple or Poirot. Even Christie seems to have thought they were boring.
Thanks for your eloquent comment!