She’s bloody clever

“Miss Marple insinuated herself so quietly into my life that I hardly noticed her arrival”, Agatha Christie wrote in her autobiography, beautifully encapsulating not just the character’s creation, but the subtle, unshowy way in which this most atypical of detectives has earned – and kept – her place in readers’ affections. Mark Aldridge’s latest Christie study, Marple: Expert on wickedness, explores every aspect of the character from her first appearance in a short story of the 1920s, through twelve novels and a vast number of stage, screen and radio adaptations, eventually coming full circle to the short story, this time as a collection written by contemporary crime writers in her honour. He approaches Miss Marple with the same affection, insight and endearing obsessiveness that made his earlier study of Poirot (2022) so informative and entertaining. Drawing on a wealth of Christie scholarship, as well as on Christie’s own words and on interviews with those who have adapted or starred in her work, he offers a thoughtful assessment of each story, showing how it fits into Christie’s life and contributes to her reputation, and writing with a wit and a fondness for anecdote that are perfectly suited to the character he’s celebrating.

And Marple is unashamedly a celebration: while Aldridge doesn’t baulk at criticizing the less successful Marple novels, his whole book is underpinned by an enormous respect for Christie’s achievements and for the detective genre as a whole. He has a talent for examining plots without giving anything away, and in the extensive notes, wherever spoilers appear, they are clearly signposted, making this a book which not only enhances the reading experience for ardent Marple fans, but certainly won’t ruin it for those coming to the stories for the first time. Not all of the ideas expressed here are new and Aldridge doesn’t claim that they are; but by bringing them together in such a detailed, comprehensive way, and embracing every aspect of Miss Marple’s world, he has created a valuable, insightful reassessment of a character whose popularity shows no sign of flagging as she approaches her hundredth birthday.

Jane Marple made her first appearance in “The Tuesday Night Club”, published in the Royal Magazine in December 1927. From the beginning, Aldridge says, she was “a reassuring presence”, created at a turbulent time in Christie’s life. The year before had seen a bewildering mixture of professional success and personal crisis: publication of her brilliant, controversial novel, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd; a deep depression following the death of her mother; her husband’s adultery and the end of her marriage; and the scandal surrounding her highly publicized disappearance. Little wonder, then, that she should crave someone whose “entire raison d’être was to be a calm point in a stormy sea”. The name was taken from Marple Hall near Manchester, close to her sister’s home, and Christie – still only in her thirties – had no shortage of older role models for inspiration, drawing on a strong matriarchal background, in particular her grandmothers and their friends. As her biographer, Laura Thompson, has argued so persuasively, Christie’s deep involvement with Marple owed much to the character’s evocation of the “wise, benign women” she grew up with.

But another important inspiration came from her own work: Caroline Sheppard, a character who had appeared in Roger Ackroyd, sister to the book’s narrator. Caroline was Christie’s favourite character in the novel – an “acidulated spinster, full of curiosity, knowing everything, hearing everything: the complete detective service in the home”. In the stage adaptation, though, the acidulated spinster was transformed into a younger, more glamorous love interest, much to her creator’s resentment. Aldridge is fascinating on the subject of Christie’s problems with later portrayals of her characters, including Marple herself, but this time her irritation was a force for good. “I think, at that moment … though I did not yet know it, Miss Marple was born”, she explained, “lined up below the border-line of consciousness, ready to come to life and step out on to the stage.”

And out she stepped – an elderly unmarried lady living quietly in the village of St Mary Mead, self-effacing at first but wise and courageous, with a ruthless streak in her quest for truth, and a deep understanding of the ways in which we love and hurt each other. Throughout her long career, Marple’s superpower – and surely one of the reasons she’s so loved – is to maintain a faith in human nature while in no way blinding herself to the wickedness of which it’s capable. Aldridge reminds us that Christie, too, saw herself as a lifelong single woman in the early days following her divorce, suggesting that “Miss Marple was an indication of her optimism for this new course of her life”; in fact, the first full-length Marple novel, The Murder at the Vicarage (1930) would be the only one that Christie would write before marrying for the second time.

Marple faded through the 1930s, years which saw the publication of Christie’s bestselling novel And Then There Were None (1939), as well as Poirot greats such as Murder on the Orient Express (1934) and The ABC Murders (1936). Her reassuring presence was called on again in wartime, with The Body in the Library (1942) and The Moving Finger (1943), books in which the wider picture of village life was as admired as the resourcefulness of Christie’s plots.

From then on, Marple changes as the books progress, and so does the world around her. Thanks to various television adaptations that appeal to our nostalgia for an England that never was, Christie’s work is too often suspended in some vaguely defined mid-twentieth century setting. Aldridge’s methodical decade-by-decade analysis allows him to emphasize the extent to which these novels act as mirrors of social change: in The Murder at the Vicarage, British class hierarchies were still in place and well-trained servants are an essential part of life, not yet impossible to come by; A Murder Is Announced (1950) bristles with a postwar fear of the stranger, and, Aldridge notes, the panic that ensues after Rex Fortescue is poisoned in A Pocket Full of Rye (1953) reflects the confusion surrounding a new National Health Service; by the time we get to The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side (1962), St Mary Mead has a supermarket and a housing estate, facts that Miss Marple accepts with her customary pragmatism (“The houses were necessary, and they were very well built”). If Christie had written only these twelve Marple novels, it’s likely that she would be recognized as much for her social commentary, characterization and interest in wider themes as she would for her mysteries.

Aldridge is an Associate Professor of Screen Histories, and the sections devoted to the various adaptations of the Marple stories sparkle with authority and delightful nuggets of trivia: Gracie Fields was the first actress to portray Miss Marple on screen, opposite Jessica Tandy and Roger Moore in an NBC version of A Murder Is Announced (1956); when Marple was shoehorned into a Poirot novel for one of the adaptations starring Margaret Rutherford, the film was so successful that Rutherford’s face ousted Poirot’s on the paperback reissue of the book; and we might never have seen Joan Hickson as Marple: Celia Johnson was first choice for the role in the BBC television series, but she died suddenly before formal discussions began. Aldridge also documents the many ways in which Marple has been adapted in other countries – a Bengali language version, for example, or an animated Japanese series – proving that the character’s appeal is not, after all, her quintessential Englishness but something much more fundamental, something more akin to what Margery Allingham praised as “the honest human curiosity in all of us”.

What does emerge very strongly, and quite shockingly, through Aldridge’s book is how consistently Christie has been damned with faint praise over the years. “Seldom can dear old Agatha’s computerised tales have been accorded such Rolls Royce treatment”, the Daily Telegraph scoffed in 1987 after the BBC broadcast of At Bertram’s Hotel; or, in the TLS, “It is a pleasure to read an author so nicely conscious of the limitations of what she is attempting”. One of the achievements of Aldridge’s book is to undermine this perception, showing the debt that all crime writers owe to Christie, not just for her creative ingenuity but also for the way in which her work has established a brand and created an appetite for detective stories across many different media. As Guy Slater (producer of the BBC series with Joan Hickson) said on going back to the original Marple novels: “These are extraordinary stories, the range of her imagination was fantastic. And they were dark; underneath the narrative, there were characters who were very twisted and had backgrounds and histories … actually she’s bloody clever”.

Nicola Upson’s most recent novel is Shot with Crimson, published last year

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