Anne Hart - Agatha Christie’s Marple

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. * * 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. 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. † † 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.

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.