Agatha's secret WEAPON
Devastated by her husband’s infidelity, Christie took revenge by inventing Miss Marple, an unlikely but steely sleuth who relished bringing murderers — and adulterers — to book
AGATHA CHRISTIE has generally been most fortunate in having avoided, thus far, the uppish and niggardly attentions of professional critics and salaried academics — as they’d find much to disparage: ‘class condescension, snobbery and racism’ for starters, says Peter Keating.
even christie herself could see that Hercule Poirot was not a good advertisement for belgians. ‘Why — why — why did I ever invent this detestable, bombastic, tiresome little creature?’ she asked.
In her books, servants tend to be simpletons with adenoids. The residents of the Home counties are stereotypes: old-school doctors, country solicitors, clergymen and retired colonels. everyone sits down to an afternoon tea of seed cake and ‘muffins oozing with butter’. When a murder is committed, there are no splattered brains or pools of blood.
christie’s world of vicarages and stone manor houses is as genteel as a broadsheet crossword puzzle. Which is exactly the strong and enduring appeal.
Peter Keating, whose biography does christie the single honour of taking her seriously as a great writer, argues that her work is ‘deliberately antiquated’. He also sees, in her ‘very special tone and vigour’, a much more subtle portrait and analysis of 20th-century british life and mores than has generally been supposed.
Far from her detective stories lacking psychological or historical depth, christie is seen by Keating as an author capable of evoking a society fighting its way through two world wars: the politics; the ‘moral and physical squalor’; the collapsing traditional hierarchy; attitudes towards criminology. It is all there, between the lines.
As P.D. James observed admiringly: ‘She has the ability to conjure a world without actually describing it.’
Keating draws our attention to the number of grounded pilots, wounded soldiers and rootless ex-servicemen littering christie’s landscape.
There is rationing, black-outs, an atmosphere of make-doand-mend and of generalised danger similar to that in Graham Greene’s work, which christie delightedly studied. In the post-war period, gardens are neglected, houses unpainted, ‘housework is shared among everyone rather than done by servants.’
rapid urban development overtakes miss marple’s village of St mary mead, which Keating assures us is situated in Sussex, near what was to become Gatwick Airport.
The spinster miss marple, who is described as ‘fluffy and dithery in appearance’, began as a parish-pump gossip, full of curiosity and with severe blue eyes. From her vantage point in a rural backwater, she saw the secrets of the universe unfold: ‘Well, my dear, human nature is much the same everywhere, and, of course, one has opportunities of observing it at close quarters in a village.’ It was a brilliant conceit. There had been women detectives before in literature — the wholly forgotten Dorcas Dene, miss Van Snoop, Lady molly of Scotland Yard — but miss marple’s shrewdness is in the immortal, Sherlock Holmes class.
She is almost supernaturally prescient as she identifies, manipulates and traps killers. ‘Darling, 100 years ago you would certainly have been burned as a witch,’ she is told.
I myself will never forget the cold-blooded way Joan Hickson, the definitive television miss marple, delivered the line: ‘I am your nemesis!’ as she unmasked the villain.
miss marple appeared in 12
novels and 20 short stories, including such classics as The Murder At The Vicarage, 4.50 From Paddington and At Bertram’s Hotel.
Always elderly, she first tottered into print in 1927 and faded away in 1976. Keating says that, were the chronology to be taken seriously, Miss Marple, who was born early in the reign of Queen Victoria, was about 108 in her prime, 115 at the finish.
The name came from Marple Hall in Cheshire, near the home of Christie’s sister, Madge. Keating explains that it was where Christie was taken by her first husband Archie after he collected her from the Harrogate Hydro in December 1926, when she had disappeared for 11 days under mysterious circumstances. ‘Amnesia’ was the excuse put forward.
The truth is Christie had suffered a nervous breakdown when Archie began an affair with the younger, prettier Nancy Neele. An official separation followed in April 1928. Though Christie famously never discussed the desolating episode in interviews, she went over and over it in every page she wrote.
As Keating says, many a murder in her books revolves around the power of sexual attraction, pushing men and women to the edge, making them ‘indifferent to the suffering of any innocent people caught up in their schemes’.
Jealousy, deceit and the bitterness of the rejected were emotions Christie had experienced first-hand — hence all the Miss Marple stories about ‘casual love affairs, unhappy marriages, divorce and the difficulty of choosing between reliable and unreliable suitors’. It can be quite shocking, particularly today, reading her tales where ‘older men are manipulating young women’.
Jane Marple, solidly Victorian in her lace and tweed, with her oldfashioned views about how ladies and gentlemen should behave, was Christie’s ideal mouthpiece, and Keating traces ‘the history of the complex relationship’ between the author and her character wonderfully well.
For example, both women know about hospitals and dispensaries (‘you were going to nurse lepers, Jane’); they were devoted to elderly parents (‘I am used to sick people’); and they had painful love affairs when ‘such a silly girl’.
THE chief difference is that where Miss Marple kept quite away from marriage and preserved a lonely, solitary status, Christie, by contrast, was to meet Sir Max Mallowan, the archaeologist, and enjoyed a long, tranquil relationship — though perhaps more brother and sister than husband and wife.
Interestingly, Christie’s visions of England in her books were mostly written in Egypt and Syria, when she accompanied Max on his digs.
Like Christie, Miss Marple possessed a deceptive sweetness. The demureness was a mask, and the way ‘she radiates a sort of shy benevolence’ was a cover for inner steel.
‘I’ve no patience with modern humanitarian scruples about capital punishment,’ she says firmly.
Agatha Christie And Shrewd Miss Marple reminds us that Christie, the chubby, smiling old lady in Devon, actually spent her long life exploring a dark and dangerous imagination.
She began publishing her detective stories in the Twenties, at exactly the same time James Joyce and T. S. Eliot were completing their experimental works.
They were obviously breaking new literary ground — with Ulysses and The Waste Land — yet so equally was Christie, with her dispassionate, impressive, psychological puzzles.
One day, thanks to enthusiasts such as Peter Keating, her low-brow status will be revised and she will finally join the pantheon of important modern writers whose inner rages critics and university academics usually long to lap up.