Geraldine McEwan portrayed Miss Marple in the UK TV series from 2004 to 2009
Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple should be just a quaint period piece. An elderly lady with no professional experience assisting the police in murder enquiries? You must be joking, guv! And yet her popularity endures.
Although it may seem that Christie’s creation is outmoded and irrelevant to present-day attitudes and expectations, in many ways she embodies the recurring motifs of contemporary crime fiction.
The maverick female
We like our mavericks hard-boiled these days. We are comfortably familiar with rule-breakers who walk a lonely path, who take chances, who numb their neuroses with vats of whisky or gallons of wine or a judicious quantity of recreational drugs.
You don’t get more unorthodox than a ‘little old lady’ who applies a razor-sharp mind to the business of detection and solves dozens of murders, outwitting, in the nicest possible way, the (male) police officers who defer to her superior brain power.
With her snow-white hair, pink crinkled face and soft innocent blue eyes, she complies with an outdated stereotype of women of a certain age (she is a actively engaged in crime-solving from her 60s to her 80th year).
Undercover agent
Jane Marple exploits her harmless presence in order to gather information. She is like an early incarnation of the ‘invisible woman’. Who would think that the old dear in her lacy cape absorbed in knitting a baby’s shawl is forensically dissecting everything that people do and say?
Margaret Rutherford took the role of Miss Marple in the 1960s in films loosely based on the Agatha Christie novels
She cultivates a flustered and incoherent way of speaking to mask the purpose of her seemingly artless questions. Her liking for fluff, in wool, in scarfs, in blankets and comforting items of clothing, belies the total lack of fluff in her mental make-up.
Although not an ‘action woman’, she initiates some most surprising interventions. She hides in a cupboard and imitates a dead woman’s voice. She acts as bait to trap a killer, sitting up in bed in her pink fluffy shawl. She foils a murder attempt by squirting soapy water in the attacker’s eyes.
The criminal psychologist
…or, as Miss Marple calls it, a person with ‘a certain knowledge of human nature’. She learns about human behaviour and what makes people tick by observing what goes on around her, mainly in her village, St Mary Mead. She has a natural gift for absorbing information and extrapolating theories of behaviour and motivation.
The village environment provides fertile ground for honing her skills of observation and deduction. She earns the approval of the young Inspector Craddock when she describes ‘the shifty fellow who looks you in the eye while fiddling your till’.
Her approach is cerebral and logical, no wild hunches and off-the-wall hypotheses. Miss Marple deals in facts.
With the assurance of a contemporary mind reader or magician, she explains how you can literally get away with murder (if she weren’t around) with the use of misdirection. If you can make people look at the wrong thing in the wrong place, she says, your actions will be undetected. Who knew, David Blaine et al?
Her conclusions present a dismal view of humankind. She knows that people do ‘terrible things’ to lay their hands on money. She believes in evil and wickedness — and capital punishment. Her sympathy is always with the victim.
The well-bred sleuth
Joan Hickson playing Miss Marple
We like our working-class detectives, with or without chips on their shoulders. We like the ones with middle-class backgrounds and lives, too. And we have a long-standing love of posh, whether it’s the professional cop or the gifted amateur.
Jane Marple isn’t in the same class as Lord Peter Wimsey, for example, but she belongs to a well-defined type of English gentility. We gather that she was a daughter of the Anglican clergy, and received a privileged but unrigorous education courtesy of governesses and a school in Florence.
She holds the values of women with her background — the importance of restraint and self-control, the necessity for good manners, awareness of social obligations.
The novels are sprinkled with references to the places frequented by Miss Marple’s type of person — the great old London department stores such as Marshall and Snelgrove and the Army and Navy Stores. With her rich schoolmate from the Florence days, she has lunch at Claridges and the Savoy. A childhood favourite, which she revisits in later life, is the Edwardian-style Bertram’s Hotel, haunt of bishops and archdeacons, posh young girls and elderly female aristos up from the country.
Culturally aware
Occasional references to contemporary culture add colour to Miss Marple’s character. She mocks the fashion in art for ‘jugs of dying flowers and broken combs on windowsills’. She is proud of her nephew who writes ‘clever books’ and prides himself on ‘never writing about anything pleasant’.
In a nice bit of intertextual reference, she mentions the ‘tough style’ of Dashiel Hammett, ‘top of the tree’ in his field.
More noir than pink
Miss Marple is closer to Mr Hammett than she realises. The novels are crammed with vignettes and anecdotes from village life, presented to illustrate a point about human behaviour. Many of these stories, with a few tweaks, wouldn’t be out of place in a novel or film of the hard-boiled genre.
Take the story of the village chemist, a married man, who becomes besotted with his young assistant and spends his savings on jewellery for her — and a radio-gramophone. Not only that, he takes her into their home and tells his wife to look on her as a daughter.
His wife discovers that the young madam has pawned the jewels to fund her liaison with a young man. The shop assistant exits, the wife triumphantly returns to centre stage sporting a diamond ring.
It’s all there, sex, money, betrayal, passion, the stuff of noir fiction and films, related in a throwaway style of narration which suggests there’s plenty more where that came from.
Convincing back story
Angela Lansbury played Miss Marple in the 1980 film of The Mirror Crack’d
We follow Jane Marple through several decades of change. The novels reflect post-war developments, with references to the changing face of the village high street, the advent of housing estates and sham-Tudor constructions, supermarkets, air travel.
The people in her life grow and develop also. The baby on the rug becomes a strapping young man. Friends are widowed. And Miss Marple, alas, has to endure some of the physical limitations of encroaching old age.
BFF
Every girl detective has a best friend, the one with whom she has intense meetings in the ladies’ toilet at work or in the nearest bar. Miss Marple’s Best Friend Forever (30 years or so) is a cheerful widow called Dolly Bantry, and you know she is a worthy bearer of that mantle when you hear her advise someone that ‘vodka should be thrown straight down the throat’.
An intriguing mix
At the same time, Miss Marple belongs to a specific era. Her person and her way of life are formed in an age which becomes more and more distant as the novels progress.
Although we recognise timeless aspects of her character, she represents a certain type of single woman who probably doesn’t exist now.
We see a genteel lady of limited means,whose clothes and possessions are worn but of good quality. She is a practising Anglican. She prays. She reads the devotional works of Thomas a Kempis. Much of her life revolves around church and parish duties. There is perhaps an echo of George Orwell’s Clergyman’s Daughter.
She has a strong sense of duty, and takes responsibility for the well-being of the young girls who work as domestic help in the village. She is a fund-raiser and board member at the local orphanage.
Miss Marple is single through circumstances rather than choice. She has had romantic involvements, but somehow they came to nothing. Her life is thickly peopled with family and friends, godchildren, honorary nephews and nieces and so on.
All this, and she takes on death by poison, strangling, drowning, bludgeoning. She looks murderers in the eye and doesn’t flinch. She is tough and brave.
So hats off to you, Miss Marple. You make us proud to reclaim the word ‘spinster’.
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