The Murder at the Vicarage by Agatha Christie

Back in early September, when I posted my list of potential reads for this year’s RIP reading challenge, many of you express your shock at hearing my say I had yet to read any Agatha Christie at all. Well, I’m happy to report that this particular gap in my reading has now been amended, and that my first experience with Dame Agatha was quite a success.

The Murder at the Vicarage is the first of the Miss Maple mysteries, and it’s set in the famous village of St. Mary’s Mead. The story is narrated by the vicar, Leonard Clement, but the mystery is of course solved by none other than Miss Maple herself, the elderly single lady whose perceptiveness and quick intellect nothing escapes. The murder the title refers to is that of Colonel Protheroe, who turns up dead at the Vicar’s study one day. The fact that the Colonel was by far the least popular inhabited of St. Mary’s Mead makes the case all the more complex, as there’s no lack of potential suspect with a motive to want him dead. But little by little, the list narrows down – until, as Sherlock Holmes would put it, the remaining hypothesis, however improbable, proves to be the only possible explanation.

I’ve gone on and on before about how a reader’s expectations of a book can very easily ruin the reading experience, even if there’s nothing whatsoever wrong with the book per se. But in the case of The Murder at the Vicarage, I’m happy to say, my expectations helped me enjoy it. Many of you had warned me in the past not to expect from Christie the same kind of storytelling I get from, say, Dorothy L. Sayers, and as a result I approach this novel counting on little more than wit, intrigue and masterful plotting. I got that indeed, with the added bonus that St. Mary’s Mead is a fascinating setting, full of intriguing characters that give Christie ample opportunity to comment on small town life.

I was particularly interested in the way Christie’s writing combines all social stereotypes of many kinds with subtle attempts to subvert them: on the one hand, you have character types such as the silly wife, the clueless policemen, the spoiled rich young lady, the unmarried elderly woman with too much time on her hands, and so on (and yes, I did find the female characters far more formulaic than the male ones). You also find characters making the type of class and gender generalisations that authors like Sayers tend to avoid; but then again, none of this necessarily means that the story itself endorses them. Sometimes it actually discreetly subverts them, as the first passage I share at the end of this post illustrates.

Miss Marple herself is a character who perfectly embodies all these tensions and contradictions. If in many ways she’s a stereotypical elderly busybody, she’s also a lot more intelligent than anyone gives her credit for. She repeatedly gets the better of those who dismiss or patronise her either because of her gender or because of her age. The fact that she’s the one to solve the mystery – drawing, as she says, from the extensive knowledge of human nature she’s acquired over the course of her long life – is a way of acknowledging forms of wisdom and competence that tend to be marginalised. And this, as you can imagine, made me very happy indeed.

While I wouldn’t exactly describe what Christie does as social writing, I also wouldn’t call it superficial, nor would I say that she’s entirely disengaged with the social issues of her time. That’s the interesting thing about literature, really: it doesn’t necessarily matter whether or not an author sets out to engage with certain themes, as the mere fact that they live in a certain time and place makes it almost impossible for its social, political and ideological questions not to be present in the writing in some shape or form.

And let us not forget the fact that The Murder at the Vicarage is a whole lot of fun to read. The plot absorbed me from the very first chapter, and I very much enjoyed my first encounter with Christie’s legendary wit. I loved her sense of humour, her subtle irony, and the fact that she never hesitates to gently mock her characters – even the first-person narrator himself, which is not an easy thing to pull off.

I’m wondering where to go next with Christie: I want to read the Poirot stories at some point, of course, but I think that for now I’m going to stick to Miss Marple, as I’m really interested in spending more time in St. Mary’s Mead. Should I continue to read them in order and get The Body in the Library next?

Interesting bits:

‘You can’t take any notice of what old ladies say. When they’ve seen something curious, and are waiting all eager like, why, time simply flies for them. And anyway, no lady knows anything about time.’
I often wonder why the whole world is so prone to generalise. Generalisations are seldom if ever true and are usually utterly inaccurate. I have a poor sense of time myself (hence the keeping of my clock fast) and Miss Marple, I should say, has a very acute one. Her clocks keep time to the minute and she herself is rigidly punctual on very occasion.

I found my wife and Miss Marple with their heads together.
‘We’ve been discussing all sorts of possibilities,’ said Griselda. ‘I wish you’d solve the case, Miss Marple, like you did the time Miss Wetherby’s gill of picked shrimps disappeared. And all because it reminded you of something quite different about a stack of coals.’
‘You’re laughing, my dear,’ said Miss Marple, ‘but after all, that is a very sound way of arriving at the truth. It’s really what people call intuition and make such a fuss about. Intuition is like reading a word without having to spell it out. A child can’t do that because it has had so little experience. But a grown-up person knows the word because they’ve seen it often before. You catch my meaning, Vicar?’

They read it too:
Just a (Reading) Fool, A library is a hospital for the mind, Notes from the North

(Yours?)