1930: The Murder at the Vicarage  

Publisher: William Collins & Sons, 1930 (UK);  Dodd, Mead & Co., 1930 (US)

Series: Miss Marple

Category: Novel

Cross refs: The Murder of Roger Ackroyd; The Thirteen Problems

Warning, spoilers!

From professional detectives to domestic sleuthing and the introduction of the second of Christie’s best-known characters: Miss Marple. The Murder at the Vicarage remains one of my favourite Agatha Christie novels, perhaps because it is so archetypally Agatha Christie (though the reviews at the time of publication were less than gushing). Set in St Mary Mead, a quintessentially English village, this rural idyll is shown to be little more than a veneer as petty rivalries, whispered secrets and poisoned pens serve to divide the community. This setting reinforces a recurring theme in Christie’s novels – one of dark truths concealed behind smiling faces.

The novel imbues the classic ‘whodunit’ with sharp social observations, often voiced via the omniscient spinster, Miss Jane Marple. In her autobiography, Christie confessed that she could not remember ‘where, when or how’ she wrote The Murder at the Vicarage, or even ‘what suggested to me that I should select a new character – Miss Marple – to act as a sleuth in the story’.[1]  However, she recognised that the character had been percolating for a number of years:

I think it is possible that Miss Marple arose from the pleasure I had takin in portraying Dr Sheppard’s sister in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. She had been my favourite character in the book – an acidulated spinster, full of curiosity, knowing everything, hearing everything: the complete detective service in the home.[2]

Caroline Sheppard was not the only inspiration for Miss Marple; elements of Christie’s grandmother also found their way into the character:

… she was far more fussy and spinsterish than my grandmother ever was. But one thing she did have in common with her – though a cheerful person, she always expected the worst of everyone and everything, and was, with almost frightening accuracy, usually proved right … I endowed my Miss Marple with something of Grannie’s powers of prophecy.[3]

Miss Marple had, of course, already found herself in print in December 1927, featuring in a series of short stories that were later to become The Thirteen Problems (1932). But The Murder at the Vicarage marks her debut in a novel.  

Narrated by Leonard Clement, ‘Len’ – the ‘unworldly’ village vicar with a scandalously younger wife, Griselda – the telling echoes the villager-on-the-spot form of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. Yet, despite the body of the universally unpopular Colonel Protheroe being found in Len’s study, and notwithstanding Len’s opening declaration that, ‘anyone who murdered Colonel Protheroe would be doing the world at large a service’, it feels unlikely that the vicar will emerge as the killer. His telling carries Christie’s characteristic humour, crystallised in the antagonism between Len and his disgruntled servant, Mary, who seems to find pleasure in alternately ‘undercooking and overcooking everything’. The playful Griselda also adds a lighter note, and helps to cast Len as a sympathetic and human character. Early on, Len observes:

My wife’s name is Griselda – a highly suitable name for a parson’s wife. But there the suitability ends … I have always been of the opinion that a clergyman should be unmarried. Why I should have urged Griselda to marry me at the end of twenty-four hours’ acquaintance is a mystery to me … Griselda is nearly twenty years younger than myself. She is most distractingly pretty and quite incapable of taking anything seriously.  She is incompetent in every way … and treats the parish as a kind of huge joke arranged for her amusement.

Griselda, meanwhile, is clearly sharp of mind and apt to get her own way, describing herself as Len’s ‘secret and delightful sin’. When urged to try a little harder in her domestic duties by her husband, she retorts, ‘I do sometimes … but on the whole I think things go worse when I’m trying’. And that is that. Early on in the book Griselda dismisses Miss Marple as ‘the worst cat in the village’, but she warms to the character as the twinkling Miss Marple earns her trust and respect. Also (and to my pleasure), the village is made complete by a hearty woman full of ‘good works’, here in the form of Miss Hartnell, ‘who is weather-beaten and jolly and much dreaded by the poor’.

Motives abound, as do sub-plots; Christie herself believed that the novel had ‘far too many characters, and too many sub-plots’, though she conceded that ‘the main plot is sound’.[4] Yet, unlike The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Murder at the Vicarage conforms more traditionally to the ‘fair-play’ approach of mystery writing. Clues are available for readers ready to spot them, offering an opportunity to solve the crime alongside the all-seeing Miss Marple – as Len notes:

Miss Marple always sees everything. Gardening is as good as a smoke screen, and the habit of observing birds through powerful glasses can always be turned to account.

Christie commented in her autobiography that this new sleuth was, ‘born at the age of sixty-five or seventy – which, as with Poirot, proved most unfortunate’, given her enduring popularity.[5] Ironically, The New York Times Review of Books wrote in November 1930 that, ‘the local sisterhood of spinsters is introduced with much gossip and click-clack. A bit of this goes a long way and the average reader is apt to grow weary of it all, particularly of the amiable Miss Marple, who is sleuth-in-chief of the affair.’[6] How wrong they were.

[1] Christie 2011, p. 433.

[2] Christie 2011, pp. 433–4.

[3] Christie 2011, pp. 435–6.

[4] Christie 2011, p. 434.

[5] Christie 2011, p. 436.

[6] The New York Times Book Review, 30 November 1930.