Little Old Ladies 8: The Nosy Miss Marple

“I’m old and I have very little strength in my arms or my legs. Very little strength anywhere.  But I am in my own way an emissary of justice.”  

Miss Marple in Nemesis, 

Chapter 21: The Clock Strikes Three

While I love Agatha Christie’s writing, and am usually outwitted by her mastery of mystery, I am usually more of a fan of her one-off novels than of her series. I’ve read a great deal of Poirot, all of her Mr. Quin, a few of her Tommy and Tuppence, and then a smattering of Miss Marple. Of all these series, Miss Marple is next to last my least favorite (I really didn’t care for Mr. Quin, but that’s another blog for another time). 

Why do I dislike Miss Jane Marple? She’s so odd, illogical, nosing into all sorts of crimes in a very un-grandmotherly type way. I always feel that it is unrealistic when she starts questioning suspects and these people actually tell her things. If some random lady came up to me and started talking local crime while she was knitting, I would at least equate her with a sort of Madame Defargean lady, especially if she started to rant about evil and seem morbidly fascinated with murder. Also the fact that she seems less than six degrees separated from murder victims would make me paranoid; at best she’s a bad luck charm, at worst a serial killer! 

(Of course Poirot suffers the same bad luck, since every time he goes on vacation a body shows up.  This trend continues from books to television, so much that one wonders why Archie Goodwin ever leaves a client alone since they’re bound to be strangled by Nero Wolfe’s necktie, or why Jessica Fletcher isn’t banned from book tours. Really, unless a detective is a cop or a private investigator, there is no other way of having a sleuth get involved in murder investigations, and even then fictional cops and gumshoes better never take a ride on the Orient Express unless they want to be accessories before or after the fact!)

That said, there are a few novels centered on Marple that I’ve found riveting despite these usual objections. A Pocket Full of Rye shows Miss Marple on a quest to find the murderer of her naïve former maid and protégé, Gladys. Somewhere along the line of her literary career Christie figured out that incorporating nursery rhymes and other innocent phrases into her mysteries gave them an eerie and unsettling tone, and this is one of the best examples I’ve read so far. The rhyme “Sing a Song of Sixpence” has always seemed a bit strange to me even as a child, but if it’s one of the poems you’ve grown up with fond memories of…well, get ready to kiss those goodbye if you read this book!

The next novel that really seemed thematically complex, if somewhat dark and morbid, was Nemesis. I only found out mid-read that this was the last Christie novel to be published while she was alive, but since I’ve not been reading Christie’s series in any particular order this didn’t bother me.  In fact I found it a very fitting dénouement to Miss Marple’s crime-fighting as well as Christie’s publishing career. It revolves around Miss Marple being commissioned to solve an unspecified crime. To do this she is to go on a tour of English country houses and gardens (another vacation that is doomed to tragedy!), which in a roundabout way leads her to a cold case of suspicious deaths, current murders, and a home of Three Weird Sisters. 

What makes Nemesis so compelling is that it really examines the understanding we have of evil.  This is something that Agatha Christie spent her life writing about. What is a murder, after all, but an evil act?  Taking the life of another human being is putting oneself in the place of God, deciding who should live and who should die. Sometimes it seems justified, other times it’s downright despicable, elevating one’s live over another’s. And yet this is the evil that is so often fought against in crime dramas. More than fraud or identity theft or burglary or abuse or kidnapping, murder is the center of most mysteries in fiction. 

I think the reason for this is along the same lines as why Nazis are such a popular villain in stories.  It’s easy to tell good-versus-evil when the evil is so ostensible. Things like racism, disrespect, amorality, and vanity are harder to fight, because they’re a lot more slippery. They’re also a lot more relatable to the average person. Most people would adamantly deny the desire to kill someone, but be a lot more hesitant to deny thinking they’re better than another culture or society. 

The thing is, these “small sins,” when left unchallenged, are exactly the catalysts for the big sins such as murder. Bitterness takes root, leading to revenge. Small things like pride and vanity can lead a human being to think their life is worth more than another, that they’re superior and therefore in a way worthy of taking someone’s life. And then there’s the simple motivations of greed, envy, even jealousy that are often the cause of death. Murder may be a sort of stereotype of evil, but it is a way for us as readers to personify all evil, and to track it down in our own lives and stamp it out, no matter how small and insignificant it might seem.