I don’t fall asleep easily, so for a good many years, I’ve listened to audiobooks and radio plays in bed — and now I’ve got an elasticated headphone band to make it a more comfortable experience.
One of my favourite bedtime listenings is Joan Hickson’s recording of The Thirteen Problems, the collection of stories in which Agatha Christie introduced the world to Miss Marple back in 1932. Miss Marple, for anyone who’s never encountered her before, is an elderly spinster living in the fictional village of St. Mary Mead, whose powers of observation, reasoning and insight make her a formidable amateur detective. It’s her particular kind of insight that sets Miss Marple apart, I reckon, and differentiates her in a fascinating way from Christie’s other famous crime-solving characters.
Miss Marple only rarely leaves St. Mary Mead during her adult lifetime, and on those few occasions, it seems, she will only do so if it means staying in nice hotels — she does all she can to avoid having to stay over in other people’s homes. She is often teased or condescended to about her stay-at-home ways. Most readily, it is men who rush to patronise her, men like her nephew, the novelist Raymond West, or Sir Henry Clithering, the retired Commissioner of Scotland Yard. But Christie makes it clear that women do it just as often, such as the artist Joyce Lempriere or the gardening-obsessed chatelaine of Gossington Hall, Dolly Bantry.
These people make the mistake of presuming that Miss Marple’s narrow horizons must correspond to a sheltered life experience and a limited understanding of the world — but that presumption is routinely and systematically proved to be dead wrong. A key phrase echoes throughout the canon of Miss Marple stories, and it is the key to unlocking her prowess at getting to the heart of Christie’s complex plots: “human nature is much the same everywhere”.
On one level, the “everywhere” is purely geographical:
“‘Well, my dear,’ said Miss Marple, ‘human nature is much the same everywhere, and, of course, one has opportunities of observing it at closer quarters in a village.’”
(The Thumb Mark of St. Peter)
The supposed contrast between village and town/city is really not much of a contrast at all:
“Human nature, dear, is very much the same everywhere. It is more difficult to observe it closely in a city, that is all.”
(They Do It With Mirrors)
On another level, that “everywhere” can also be cultural:
“Of course Mr. Badger was a chemist, and a very rude, common old man as well, and Sir Ambrose Bercy was a very courtly gentleman, so Mrs. Bantry says, but for all that human nature is very much the same everywhere.”
(The Herb of Death)
The interrelated factors of privilege, manners, money and freedom from work which, many Christie characters assume, elevate one social class above another are in fact shown to do nothing of the sort. More often than not, it is the wealthy and the well-to-do, the educated and the cosmopolitan who surrender to their murderous, avaricious, adulterous and larcenous impulses — and who believe that they will get away with it. But they don’t reckon on crossing swords with someone who has seen it all (or at least a village incident very much like it) before.
“I’m afraid observing human nature for as long as I have done, one gets not to expect very much from it. I dare say the idle tittle-tattle is very wrong and unkind, but it is so often true, isn’t it?”
(Murder at the Vicarage)
Sarah Hinlicky Wilson elaborates on some of these principles in her essay “Miss Marple’s Low Anthropology” — well worth a read for an examination of how surprisingly dark Miss Marple’s view of the world can be.
