In honour of the new Miss Marple continuation by Lucy Foley which came out this week in the US (and at the end of the monht in the UK) this week’s series post is on Agatha Christie’s classic series, which by some mad oversight I haven’t previously written to a series post for. How fortitous for us all
I mean I’m not sure that there is anyone who doesn’t know who Miss Marple is at this point, but just in case there is someone out there and reading this who doesn’t, I will still recap you the set up. Jane Marple is an elderly spinster who lives in the village of St Mary Mead. The first novel that features her isThe Murder at the Vicarage, where an unpopular church warden is found shot dead in the vicar’s study, which is told from the point of view of the vicar, who sees her as just another of the elderly village women – but in reality she is a close observer of human nature and very astute. In this early book she is a little harder and less easy to like than she becomes later in the series – the rest of the village find her nosiness tiresome but as you go through the series she becomes more of the person that people in the village go to when they have a problem that they need to solve – which is closer to the characterisation that you find in the Joan Hickson adaptations if you are familiar with them (which I am very, very familiar with!).
There are 12 novels in the series (and numerous short stories) and with the exclusion of the final book if you read them in order you see Miss Marple ageing and growing more infirm in body (definitely not in mind!) even if the age that she is varies wildly going up and down between books. The exception is Sleeping Murder which was written to be the final story and published posthumously in 1976 but actually written and set in the mid 1940s and so some of the character developments that have occurred over the previous books in the series aren’t there. I was terrified by the cover of the edition of Sleeping Murder my mum had when I was first reading these (aged about 11) which had knitting needles in a woman’s eyes for some reason, and the TV adaptation of it was one of my least favourites and so I hadn’t actually read it for years until this year and actually now I like it a lot more than I did. In fact now I’ve revisited all of them it is considerably higher up my list than it was.
I listened to them all (as you could see from the Week in Books I guess) over the last few months in preparation for reading the Lucy Foley and I think my favourites are The Body in the Library, A Murder is Announced and Nemesis, but it’s hard to decide. I definitely know which ones I like less (The Mirror Crack’d From Side to Side, They Do It With Mirrors and Caribbean Mystery) but because I’ve watched the Joan Hickson adaptations so many times and I have favourites among them it can sometimes be hard to separate the book from the adaptation – even though there are often a fair few differences. But Miss Marple’s shrewd judgement of human nature and ability to find a village parallel remains across it all – and as the times change and the world changes around her, her ability to unflinchingly find the person responsible for a crime makes for a great read.
They remain one of the exemplar series of classic Golden Age mystery and I love them for it.
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 