The vicarage in The Murder at the Vicarage is in the small village of St Mary Mead, a village in which Miss Marple had always lived and from which she was rarely to stray for the rest of her life. She did not go out into the world in search of murder; it came to her. We are not meant to wonder at the fact that so much violence should be concentrated in so small and, in all other respects, so apparently innocuous a village, and indeed to wonder would be churlish. In her introduction to murder, in The Murder at the Vicarage, Miss Marple acquits herself well. Although she is not trained to detect crime, she is inquisitive, has a good memory, a rather sour opinion of human nature (though she would deny this) and a habit of solving problems by analogy. She does not possess little grey cells of the quality of Hercule Poirot’s, and when congratulated upon her success is likely to attribute it to the fact that she has lived in an English village all her life and thus has seen human nature in the raw.
The surface cosiness of village life, disturbed by violent crime and then found to be somewhat murky under the surface, is something which Agatha Christie is extremely adept at conveying. In The Murder at the Vicarage, one of the vicar’s more irritating parishioners, Colonel Protheroe, is found dead in the vicar’s study. There is no shortage of suspects, including the vicar himself who narrates the story, his flighty young wife, Griselda, and his teenage nephew, Dennis. The relationship between the vicar and his wife is amusingly presented. More likely suspects are the Colonel’s widow, his daughter, a slightly dubious anthropologist, and a mysterious Mrs Lestrange. Dr Haydock, Miss Marple’s physician and next-door neighbour, must be above suspicion as he is to appear in a number of later Miss Marple stories, and the same applies, surely, to Miss Marple’s nephew, Raymond West, a novelist and poet who writes the kind of novels and poems, all pessimism and squalor, which Miss Marple rather detests, though of course she is proud of her nephew’s reputation.
Like Poirot, Miss Marple is elderly when we first meet her in 1930, and over the next forty years she will age some more, but not as much as forty years. Agatha Christie based Miss Marple on the kind of old lady she had met often in west country villages when she was a girl, and described her also as being rather like the fussy old spinsters who were her grandmother’s ‘Ealing cronies’. With Agatha Christie’s grandmother, Miss Marple shared a propensity to expect the worst of everyone and, usually, to be proved right. She was to exhibit this propensity in twelve novels and twenty short stories.
The Murder at the Vicarage provides an auspicious début for Miss Marple, and a mystery which few of her readers will solve before the amateur sleuth of St Mary Mead even though Mrs Christie’s tactics are not dissimilar to those she adopted in her first novel. In later years, Agatha Christie professed to be less pleased with The Murder at the Vicarage than when she had written it, having come to the conclusion that there were far too many characters and too many sub-plots. But she still thought the main plot sound, and added, ‘The village is as real to me as it could be – and indeed there are several villages remarkably like it, even in these days [the early 1960s].’
The domestics in St Mary Mead are a dim lot, and rather unsympathetically described by Mrs Christie. This may be because she wishes her readers not to consider them as ‘real people’ and therefore potential suspects, but you cannot help observing that Mary, the vicar’s all-purpose servant, is presented as a truculent dim-wit and an appalling cook, that the artist, Lawrence Redding, describes his cleaning woman as ‘practically a half-wit, as far as I can make out’, and that Gladys, kitchen-maid at the Old Hall, is ‘more like a shivering rabbit than anything human’. It should also be noted that Mrs Christie, like the Almighty, helps those who help themselves. The vicar is, for the most part, the essence of Christian charity, but he is prone to make cynical remarks about the ‘thorough-going humanitarian’ and to sneer at Dr Haydock’s sympathy for what the vicar calls ‘a lame dog of any kind’. Sentiments more Christiean than Christian. The police in Agatha Christie novels are not always the comic incompetent butts of the private detective, but Inspector Slack (who also appears in two short stories and in the 1942 novel, The Body in the Library) is a satirically characterized stupid police officer disliked by all, rude and overbearing, and foolhardy enough to allow his contempt for Miss Marple’s suggestions to show.
There is no formula by which you can forecast guilt in the works of Agatha Christie. Nevertheless, for some years after the collapse of the novelist’s marriage to Archie Christie, her readers would do well to cast a wary eye upon any handsome young men in the novels, while keeping in mind the fact that resemblances to Colonel Christie do not automatically stamp a character as the murderer!
On 16 December 1949, nineteen years after the novel’s first publication, Agatha Christie’s Murder at the Vicarage, dramatized by Moie Charles and Barbara Toy, was produced in London at the Playhouse or, as it was tautologically called at the time, the Playhouse Theatre. (The Playhouse still stands, at the Thames Embankment end of Northumberland Avenue.)
A reasonably faithful and straightforward adaptation of the novel, Murder at the Vicarage simplifies the original plot somewhat, and alters the ending, though not the murderer’s identity, in the interests of dramatic effect. The play is set, not in the 1930 of the novel, but in ‘the present time’, i.e. 1949, with references to American airmen being stationed in the village during the war.
With Barbara Mullen as Miss Marple, Reginald Tate (who also directed the play) as Lawrence Redding, Jack Lambert as the Vicar, and Genine Graham as his wife, Griselda, Murder at the Vicarage had a reasonably successful run of four months, and later became popular with repertory companies and amateurs. A production at the Savoy Theatre in the West End of London in 1975, with Barbara Mullen returning to her role of Miss Marple, and Derek Bond as the Vicar, ran for two years.
A television adaptation in two episodes was produced by BBC TV, the first part being shown on Christmas Day 1986, with Joan Hickson as Miss Marple.
The Mysterious Mr Quin SHORT STORIES (1930)
1930 was professionally a busy year for Agatha Christie. In addition to The Murder at the Vicarage, she had two books published and her first play produced. One of the books was a volume in which were collected a number of stories featuring Mr Quin and Mr Satterthwaite, stories which she had written at the rate of one every three or four months for publication in magazines. Mrs Christie refused to produce a series of Mr Quin stories for any one magazine. She considered them to be something special and apart from her usual crime stories, and preferred to write about Mr Quin only when she really felt like doing so.
Twelve of the stories were collected in The Mysterious Mr Quin (published in March 1930). The game is given away almost immediately when one notes that the volume is dedicated ‘To Harlequin the invisible’ and that, in the opening story, an unexpected visitor who ‘appeared by some curious effect of the stained glass above the door, to be dressed in every colour of the rainbow’ announces, ‘By the way, my name is Quin – Harley Quin’.1 Whenever Mr Quin makes a first appearance in these stories, some trick of the light makes him seem momentarily to be dressed in the motley costume of Harlequin and to wear the commedia dell’ arte character’s mask. Then the illusion vanishes, as Mr Quin is seen to be merely a tall, thin, dark man – and young, according to a fugitive Mr Quin story not collected in this volume – conventionally dressed.
A by-product of Agatha Christie’s youthful interest in the characters of the commedia dell’ arte and of the sequence of Harlequin and Columbine poems, ‘A Masque from Italy’,