Reflecting on Miss Marple

Marion Shaw, Sabine Vanacker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429838514
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Originally published in 1991, Reflecting on Miss Marple looks at the incongruous combination of violence, murder and a sweet, white-haired old lady, and examines why this makes such a potent but unlikely formula. The book is an astute and engaging account which reveals Miss Marple as a feminist heroine, triumphantly able to exploit contemporary prejudices against unmarried women in order to solve her case. The authors explore the inherent contradictions of Agatha Christie's Miss Marple novels, their social context, and their place in detective fiction as a whole.

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Chapter One

WOMEN WRITERS AND THE GOLDEN AGE OF DETECTIVE FICTION

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IN 1928, Dorothy L. Sayers compiled a collection of short detective stories and concluded her introductory essay by celebrating the status and quality of detective fiction at that time: ‘The average detective-novel to-day is extremely well written, and there are few good living writers who have not tried their hand at it at one time or another’ (Sayers, in Winks, 1980: 83). Although this benign view of the genre was shared by other writers — Robert Graves and Alan Hodge, for instance — there were those who were appalled by its increasing popularity. Q.D. Leavis noted that ‘an inordinate addiction to light reading’ had been taken as a sign of vice in the nineteenth century but by the time she was writing Fiction and the Reading Public (1932) so degenerate had educated taste become that the keenest devotees of detective fiction were the educated classes — scientific men, clergymen, lawyers, businessmen —who ‘in the last century would have been the guardians of the public conscience in the matter of mental self-indulgence’ (Leavis, 1932: 50). Q.D. Leavis’s sense of a world run mad on vicarious crime is upheld by the readership percentages of the lending libraries. At W.H. Smith’s, a quarter of the novels available were crime novels, romances making up half the stock and adventure stories the last quarter. But a more lowbrow library would include up to 45 per cent detective stories among its titles (Beauman 1983: 173–4).

The period between the wars, when the crime story became a major popular genre, has come to be known as the Golden Age of detective fiction. This description misleadingly suggests a homogeneous and ‘classic’ body of writing. In fact, the detective novel sprang from a range of different backgrounds and produced diverse detectives and differing ideologies of detection. Poe’s Paris-based stories show an austere and remote detective (Auguste Dupin) whereas Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes is a flamboyant figure involved in sensational plots. In the inter-war period, the humorous detachment of the crime-puzzle novels of Sayers and Christie contrasts strongly with American hard-boiled realism and the cynical attitudes of a private eye like Marlowe or the avuncular compassion of Simenon’s Maigret. The rural, middle-class society depicted in most Christie novels is totally different from the big-city squalor and scepticism of Dashiell Hammett. Throughout its history, it seems, the detective novel has found a successful place for itself within a variety of cultural contexts from upper-class Victorian London to Prohibition America. Lately, it has become a vehicle of modern feminism in the novels of Amanda Cross, Rebecca O’Rourke, Valerie Miner and others. The detective novel has conveyed all these very different cultures and interpretations of life and has obviously made such adaptations successfully.

It may seem surprising that such diverse types of writing should find a place within a literary genre which is as notoriously defined and institutionalized as the detective novel. For it is the case that both its authors and its critics have been obsessed by a prescriptive desire to regulate the detective novel’s form and establish its definition. This belief in codification is understandable because certain features have persisted throughout the historical changes and in spite of the diversity of types within the genre. These constant factors, which may be called the literary core of the genre, concern the relationship between two individuals, the detective and the criminal, a relationship which involves a battle of wits: even in its most violent manifestations, detective fiction is never merely a shootout between detective and criminal but always involves a test of cunning and deduction. The conflict between the detective and the criminal also represents, however ambivalently, an opposition between right and wrong, order and disorder. These elements are so presented as to constitute, to varying degrees, a literary game in which the reader is invited, indeed required, to join.

This limited literary code, present in all detective stories, can be traced to the rise of a strong, moneyed bourgeoisie in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Its ascent was accompanied by major changes in social relations. For the first time, the ownership of capital started to control the upwards and downwards mobility within society rather than class status based on the ownership of land. Detective stories clearly reflect this concern for capital, new in the eighteenth century and a dominant influence in the nineteenth; in particular, they are concerned with the effect of money on personal relations and the acquisition of possessions and their legitimate inheritance through the generations. The crimes in detective fiction are usually crimes against wealth and property; murder threatens to make the wrong person inherit, theft withdraws capital from its owner. These crimes are a corruption of normal financial transactions and consequently constitute a central anxiety in capitalist society which the detective story addresses.

This concern with property and capital is matched in importance in the ideology of the detective novel by the growth of individualism in capitalist society. As Stephen Knight (1980) has pointed out, an interest in crime and the apprehension of criminals can be traced back at least as far as The Newgate Calendar (c. 1774). When compared to the later detective genre, however, this early crime writing rests on different ideological assumptions. Painstaking detective work is significantly absent: when the crime has been committed, ‘some men come up’ and immediately identify and seize the culprit. This society is already interested in capitalist transactions but it is still a firmly organic and monolithic community, or at least these stories want us to believe so. Consequently, no sleuthing is necessary; the culprits betray themselves, they stand out because their crime has put them outside the Christian community. And the community as an entity reacts and punishes.

The growth of liberalism in the eighteenth century, however, shifted the emphasis of the reigning ideology on to a strain the importance of the individual. Liberalism now foregrounded the individual, his or her situation or needs, and, as becomes obvious in a nineteenth-century writer like J.S. Mill, his or her rationality. Mill’s ‘On Liberty‘ (1859) champions the belief that the rational human being, who undertakes logical, reasoned actions, is now an attainable reality. Romanticism had also bolstered the ascendancy of the individual, even if it stressed a capacity for sensibility rather than, and often in reaction to, this formidable belief in rationality. But Romanticism also added hero-status to the individual who now stood magnified, in isolation, out of or in opposition to society. Drawing on ingredients from these twin nineteenth-century strands of Romanticism and rationalism, a new individual arose in literature: the detective.

It is generally agreed that Edgar Allan Poe’s The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841) was the first detective fiction in English. Poe would not have thought of himself as a detective writer; he was writing in a tradition of Gothic horror tales which included the crime story. Nevertheless he can lay claim to originating the detective story because, in the figure of Auguste Dupin, he introduced what has become the distinguishing feature of the genre, namely, the detective. Dupin, like his more famous successor, Sherlock Holmes, whose first appearance was in A Study in Scarlet (1887), represents the power of the controlling, investigative intelligence to restore order to a world temporarily thrown into chaos by the actions of the criminal. Dupin and Holmes are the masters of logic who are the self-appointed guardians of the money society, and who, within carefully defined limits, look after its moral welfare. These characteristics, and the romantic qualities of isolation and superiority which Dupin and Holmes exhibit, are developed, sometimes with ironic modifications, in Chandler’s grim sleuths as well as in Hercule Poirot, Lord Peter Wimsey, and such present-day heroes as P.D. James’s Adam Dalgliesh.

Romanticism, rationalism, and individualism within bourgeois society are, then, the conditions in which the detective genre came to birth and they provide its core ideology. The basic plot-formula resulting from this ideology involves a crime-mystery committed against property or inheritance which is solved by the hero-detective who is the guardian of capitalist society. This core ideology and its structuring narrative pattern, which are present in all, or most, detective stories, can be adapted to the needs of a particular period and a particular society. In the hard-boiled novels of Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett, for instance, the rational investigation of a crime is strained by the need for a sensational, action-packed plot in tune with the mood of America during the Depression and Prohibition. The core ideology of the genre is thus augmented by a sub-ideology. During the era in which Agatha Christie came to fame the detective story in England developed its own variations and forged a sub-ideology so marked and popular as to earn it the designation of ‘classical’ or ‘Golden Age’. And it was as writers of classical or Golden Age detective fiction that women were to prove so very successful.

What characterized the classical detective novel of the interbellum, and what its authors strove hard to institute, was the notion of the genre as a puzzle or a game operating honestly within rules. Some idea of this kind had been present to Conan Doyle in his conception of Holmes: thinking of previous detective stories

it struck me what nonsense they were, to put it mildly, because for getting the solution of the mystery, the authors always depended on some coincidence. This struck me as not a fair way of playing the game, because the detective ought really to depend for his successes on his own mind and not on merely adventitious circumstances which do not, by any means, always occur in real life.

(Quoted in Knight, 1980: 67)

But although Holmes is rational and empirical — ‘You know my method. It is founded upon the observance of trifles’, he says — his rationality is mysterious, superhuman almost, and the reader is left out of the detection process, trailing along, Watson-like, in the wake of Holmes’s genius. In the classical detective novel of the inter-war period, the hitherto passive reader is invited to search along with the sleuth: democracy comes to the detective story. ‘I think each one of us in his secret heart fancies himself as Sherlock Holmes’, says the vicar in The Murder at the Vicarage and if this is true, at least for those reading the novel, then Christie and her Golden Age contemporaries provided the material to indulge this fancy.

This democratization was a major impulse in the foundation in 1932 of the Detection Club with G.K. Chesterton, E.C. Bentley and Dorothy L. Sayers among its founding members. The Club had a constitution and rules, and an election ceremony, allegedly composed by Sayers and Chesterton, in which members swore an oath promising that their detectives would ‘well and truly detect the crimes presented to them’ without reliance on ‘Divine Revelation, Feminine Intuition … Mumbo Jumbo, Jiggery-Pokery, Coincidence or the Act of God’. Members of the Club also wrote essays — such as ‘Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories’ by S.S. Van Dine, ‘A Defence of Detective Stories’ by G.K. Chesterton, and Dorothy L. Sayers’s introductions to The Omnibus of Crime and Great Tales of Detection — which aimed both to regularize and dignify the detective story and to emphasize the new aspects in its ideology, the idea of the game, the puzzle, and the notion of fair play. The Club was also concerned to stress the realism of the genre, its relevance to the ordinary lives of its readers.

Thus the classical detective story sets its crime, usually a murder relating to money and property, in the milieu of respectable, bourgeois life. The detection of the crime is intellectualized into a game involving the reading of signs, a game which is played by several sets of players in a kind of semiotic hierarchy. At the lowest level of cognizance are the characters in the novel, most of whom, including the murderer, are deliberately or unwittingly laying clues of their own in relation to other characters, which each partially or totally misreads. Next in the chain are the novel’s readers who are reading the clues so that they can solve the mystery themselves. Then there is the expert games-player, the detective, who is reading the signs in a superior but not a superhuman way. Finally, of course, there is the author, the supreme puzzle-maker in the hierarchy; like a chess grand-master playing several boards at once, the author determines the progress of each game that is being played, and in one of the games, the one with the reader, there is, according to the rules laid down in classical detective fiction, a special relationship of what might be called honest deception. The reader can be fooled and led up the garden path (indeed, part of the charm of reading detective fiction lies in just such hazards) but this must be fairly done: coincidence must not be excessive; intuition should be minimal; facts, such as those concerning poisons, the geography of a place, or the time it takes to do things, should be accurate. Above all, clues should not be arbitrary: they can be right or wrong, but they should not be merely random, meaningless, autonomous. In opposition to real life, the detective’s world is semiotically fully determined; every clue is significant, pointing towards the eventual discovery of the criminal and also towards the exculpation of the innocent. This gives the pleasant illusion that reality is intelligible and can therefore be controlled. If the author is incompetent or unfair, this constitutes a ‘crime’ against the reader; it destroys the subtle power hierarchy upon which detective fiction depends and removes the comforting sense of the ability of logic to make sense of reality. In really satisfying detective fiction of the classic type, the author must win the game with the reader whilst at the same time demonstrating that the truth of the crime is entirely accessible to anyone with logical powers only a little above the ordinary. The burden of this double manoeuvre usually requires an apparently impossible denouement to the story in which surprise and logical inevitability are equally present.

To Dorothy L. Sayers, who was one of the most theoretical of the interbellum detective writers, this emphasis on the puzzle and on fair play was a revolutionary development. In earlier detective fiction, like some of the Sherlock Holmes stories, clues were introduced to revive a flagging plot and there was a reliance on coincidence and intuition to an improbable degree. This kind of authorial arbitrariness was no longer allowable; the genre was controlled and formulaic, governed by rules such as Ronald Knox’s ‘A Detective Story Decalogue’ which included the instructions that ‘No accident must ever help the detective, nor must he ever have an unaccountable intuition which proves to be right’, and ‘The detective must not light on any clues which are not instantly produced for the inspection of the reader’, as well as more precise regulations such as Not more than one secret passage is allowable’ and ‘The stupid friend of the detective, the Watson, must not conceal any thoughts which pass through his mind; his intelligence must be slightly, but very slightly, below that of the average reader’ (Knox, in Winks, 1980: 200–2). Knox is exaggerating the formula in order to mock it but he nevertheless points to a serious intention of these interbellum writers to dignify the detective genre by promoting its rational qualities.

The rationality and logic which are of prime importance to the detective novel of this period actually involve a double display of logic. The rationality of the detective repeats the thinking of the criminal; the criminal’s plot to commit the crime and evade discovery are shadowed by the detective’s tracing of this plot and its exposure in the final act. There are thus two complementary and dialectical aspects of the plot developing simultaneously, in which the reader’s attention moves forward to the resolution of the crime and backwards towards its origins. In this way, total control is established over the crime at the heart of the action. At the end of a classical detective novel, both the crime’s past and the criminal’s future are completely known and defined. The reader thus participates in an illusion of domination over past and future. This insistence on logic is an assertion of power, an ideological affirmation that the rational individual can regulate events. However lighthearted, this wish for control over the surrounding reality underlies both the reading and writing of detective fiction.

Yet control only exists in the face of disorder. Much of the pleasure of reading classical detective fiction lies in the possibility of the control over reality slipping, and logic not being able to make sense of a mass of information, only some of which will lead to the truth of the crime.

It’s very interesting’, [Miss Marple] said with a sigh, ‘all the different things that people say – and think. The things they see – or think that they see. And all so complex, nearly all so trivial and if one thing isn’t trivial, it’s so hard to spot which one – like a needle in a haystack.’

(MIA: ch. 8)

The task of the detective, shadowed by the reader, is to take account of everything everybody says and from it to discover truth, the needle in the haystack. Before this happens, red herrings are introduced and truth is temporarily shown as complicated, relative and not to be readily ascertained. The detective story thus plays with the idea of the breakdown of meaning, only to conclude triumphantly that it does exist; there is a needle in a haystack. Dorothy L. Sayers’s seventh novel, Five Red Herrings, explicitly makes the point by providing all six of her suspects with plausible scenarios for the murder of a fellow painter. Five of these are misreadings but until that is discovered, there is the fear of all versions being equally true – or untrue. This fissure at the heart of logic, the fact that logic can lead to many ‘truths’ in a world of multiple meanings, is quickly covered up by the success of the sleuth but not before the writer and reader of detective fiction have enjoyed a frisson at the possibil...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Important note
• List of Abbreviations
• Agatha Christie: Some Biographical Notes
• Introduction
• Chapter One: Women Writers and the Golden Age of Detective Fiction
• Chapter Two: Miss Marple the Spinster
• Chapter Three: Two Gills of Picked Shrimps: Miss Marple as Detective
• Chapter Four: Miss Marple’s Afterlife
• Appendix: List of Novels Mentioned in Chapter Four
• Bibliography and References