Anne Hart - Agatha Christie’s Marple

Little Gates, Mrs Lestrange’s house, had formerly belonged to a retired Anglo-Indian colonel, a far more familiar type of newcomer. Indeed, there were a number of collections of brass tables and Burmese idols scattered around St Mary Mead: Major Vaughan at The Larches, for example, and Colonel Wright at Simla Lodge. Bearers, tigers, chota hazri, safari and Kikuyu. became familiar words. But these soldierly old boys and their wives were never regarded as strangers (i.e. primary criminal suspects). Armed with letters of introduction and an old regimental tie, the retired general or commander who came to live in St Mary Mead was welcomed as ‘one of us.’

Two other important people in St Mary Mead were the bank manager and the solicitor. In the early days the solicitor was Mr Petherick, ‘a dried-up little man with eye-glasses which he looked over and not through.’ After his death, his son carried on the family business, but for some reason we learn little of him or of Mr Wells, his successor, except that young Ronnie Wells left St Mary Mead for East Africa to start a series of cargo boats on the lakes and lost all his money in the venture.

The St Mary Mead branch of Middleton’s bank stood at 132 High Street. ‘Do you remember Joan Croft, Bunch?’ Miss Marple once asked a goddaughter. ‘Used to stalk about smoking a cigar or a pipe. We had a Bank hold-up once, and Joan Croft was in the Bank at the time. She knocked the man down and took his revolver away from him. She was congratulated on her courage by the Bench.’ Alas, this is all we ever learn of Joan Croft.

Over the years Miss Marple reminisced about several different bank managers and their families. There was Mr Hodgson, who ‘went on a cruise and married a woman young enough to be his daughter. No idea of where she came from.’ There was Mr Eade, ‘a very conservative man – but perhaps a little too fond of money.’ Young Thomas Eade, his son, turned out to be a bit of a black sheep and ended up in the West Indies. ‘He came home when his father died and inherited quite a lot of money. So nice for him.’ And there was Mr Emmett, who had married beneath him with the unfortunate result that his wife ‘was in a position of great loneliness since she could not, of course, associate with the wives of the trades people.’

Miss Marple no doubt produced this particular ‘of course’ with her head ‘a little on one side looking like an amiable cockatoo,’ for there it was, the undeniable fact that St Mary Mead was divided into two worlds, with an overall consensus that things went much more comfortably if everyone stuck to the one in which the Good Lord had caused them to be born. Which brings us to that section of the village map marked ‘Shops and Small Houses’ and the people who lived and worked in them.

The fishmonger’s, which stood on the High Street overlooking the vicarage road, appears to have been the principal clearinghouse for village information. Over the years this establishment had several different shop assistants and delivery boys, all of whom were called Fred. It becomes confusing to sort out all these young Freds, but we can be sure that at least two of them were different people – Fred Jackson in The Murder at the Vicarage and Fred Tyler, recalled by Miss Marple in A Murder Is Announced. The main function of these young men seems to have been to court girls and distribute the news of the latest felony, along with the kippers and herrings, around the village. In ‘Tape-Measure Murder,’ Miss Marple uttered two words, ‘The fish,’ in reply to Constable Palk’s demand of how, within half an hour of the discovery of the body, she had learned of a murder. Many years later, in A Pocket Full of Rye, the incumbent Fred of that day was to be the innocent cause of Miss Marple’s maid, Gladys, leaving the village for another post and a dreadful fate. One cannot help but hope that she had a few moments of happiness before realizing young Fred was not really interested – perhaps in the mysterious room over the fishmonger’s, which Miss Wetherby once roguishly hinted about to the Vicar. ‘I now know,’ he wrote resignedly, ‘where maids go on their days out.’

The butcher, genial Mr Murdoch, employed a delivery boy as well, but he never appears to have built up the same following as young Fred. In this establishment it was Mr Murdoch who seems to have acquired a rather amorous reputation, though ‘some people said it was just gossip, and that Mr Murdoch himself liked to encourage the rumours!’

Mr Golden, the baker, had a van as well as a delivery boy; in ‘The Case of the Caretaker’ its door was taken off to serve as a stretcher for the murder victim. Mr Golden also had an ambitious daughter, Jessie, who left St Mary Mead to work as a nursery governess and married the son of the house, who was home on leave from India.

Barnes, the grocer, was a favourite of the old guard and, much to Miss Marple’s relief, his shop was to remain unchanged for the next thirty years. ‘So obliging , comfortable chairs to sit in by the counter, and cosy discussions as to cuts of bacon, and varieties of cheese.’ The greengrocer, however, was another story. In The Murder at the Vicarage we find that he was ‘not behaving at all nicely with the chemist’s wife,’ which was not surprising, considering that the chemist’s shop always seemed to be in a state of marital upheaval.

The chemist, whose wife enjoyed the attentions of the greengrocer, rejoiced in the name of Cherubim. One of Mr Cherubim’s predecessors, a Mr Badger, was recalled by Miss Marple in The Body in the Library. He ‘made a lot of fuss over the young lady who worked in his cosmetics section. Told his wife they must look on her as a daughter and have her live in the house.’ So infatuated did Mr Badger become that he spent a lot of his savings on a diamond bracelet and radio-gramophone for the girl, until he discovered that she was carrying on with another man. Despite this setback Mr Badger seems to have gone from strength to strength, for we next hear of him as a supposed widower in ‘The Herb of Death’ with:

‘… a very young housekeeper – young enough to be not only his daughter but his granddaughter. Not a word to anyone, and his family, a lot of nephews and nieces, full of expectations. And when he died, would you believe it, he’d been secretly married to her for two years?’

The wool shop was run by Mrs Cray, who was ‘devoted to her son, spoilt him, of course. He got in with a very queer lot.’ The paper shop was run by Mrs Pusey, whose nephew ‘brought home stuff he’d stolen and got her to dispose of it … And when the police came round and started asking questions, he tried to bash her on the head.’ Longdon’s, the draper’s, was where Miss Marple had her curtains made up; Mrs Jameson, who ‘turned you out with a nice firm perm,’ did her hair; and Miss Politt, who lived above the post office and was a principal in ‘Tape-Measure Murder,’ was her dressmaker.

St Mary Mead also had a builder named Cargill who ‘bluffed a lot of people into having things done to their houses they never meant to do’; an automobile mechanic named Jenkins who was none too honest over batteries; and a vet, Mr Quinton, whose peccadilloes, if any, have gone unrecorded.

One of the most venerable institutions in the village was Inch’s Taxi Service. It had been started by Mr Inch many years before in the days of horse and cab and, though it had long since graduated to motorcars and other owners, it always retained the name of Inch. The older ladies of St Mary Mead invariably referred to their journeys by taxi as ‘going somewhere “in Inch”, as though they were Jonah and Inch was a whale.’

The post office stood at the crossroads on a corner opposite the church. The postman was absent-minded and so was the postmistress. Griselda once teased her husband: