A Brief Guide to Agatha Christie by Nigel Cawthorne

Author:Nigel Cawthorne
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781472110695
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

5

THE SLEUTH OF ST MARY MEAD

Jane Marple is thought to have had her genesis in Caroline Sheppard, the sister/housekeeper of Dr Sheppard in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. When playwright Michael Morton adapted the book for the stage, he replaced the character with a young girl. Christie responded by creating the ultimate old maid detective. She was, Christie said, ‘the sort of old lady who would have been rather like some of my grandmother’s Ealing cronies – old ladies whom I have met in so many villages where I have gone to stay as a girl’.

Miss Marple first appears in ‘The Tuesday Night Club’ in 1927, where novelist Raymond West introduces his Aunt Jane. She is knitting in a big grandfather chair at the fireside. Her eyes are ‘faded blue’, her hair snowy white, piled up under a black lace cap. She also wore black lace mittens and a black brocade dress, pinched at the waist, with Mechlin lace cascading down the front. Already she was between sixty-five and seventy, but she would last another fifty years.

However, by A Pocket Full of Rye in 1953, Miss Marple has developed into the woman the reader has always had in their mind’s eye – ‘a tall, elderly lady wearing an old-fashioned tweed coat and shirt, a couple of scarves and a small felt hat with a bird’s wing [carrying] a capacious handbag with an aged but good quality suitcase reposed at her feet’. She does, however, continue the knitting throughout.

Along the way, she makes many deft changes of clothing. In The Murder in the Vicarage, she wears a very fine Shetland shawl thrown over her head and shoulders, while in Nemesis she wears a light tweed skirt, a string of pearls and a small velvet toque. She has a blue enamel watch pinned to the side of her dress and, when visiting the Caribbean, she replaces her stout walking shoes with sandals and plimsolls, which she finds ‘not . . . elegant, but suited to the climate and comfortable and roomy for the feet’. Her nephew’s wife Joan had induced her to accept a small cheque to purchase suitable clothing for the tropics, but at her age she could not bring herself to buy anything thin. And for evening wear, she adopts ‘the best traditions of the provincial gentlewoman of England – grey lace’.

Miss Marple has a ‘light spare figure’. Her hair is grey or snow-white, her face pink and crinkled, her teeth ‘ladylike’ and she rests her head to one side ‘like an amiable cockatoo’. Often she carries an umbrella. In ‘The Case of the Perfect Maid’ her handbag is found to contain ‘a handkerchief, an engagement book, an old-fashioned leather purse, two shillings, three pennies, and a striped piece of peppermint rock’. And by Nemesis, Miss Marple is a bit more businesslike and carries a small notebook and a Biro.

Miss Marple’s health is generally good. However, she spends time at a spa in ‘A Christmas Tragedy’ and A Murder is Announced.

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