The Murder at the Vicarage (1930) by Agatha Christie

Over the past two years, I have had the pleasure of returning to Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express (1934), Death in the Clouds (1935), Hercule Poirot's Christmas (1938) and Evil Under the Sun (1941), which not only stood up to a second reading, but often better than memory had me believe – rekindling my admiration for her nearly matchless talent as a plot creator. I've always thought Christie's best detective fiction can be found in the Hercule Poirot series and some exceptional standalone novels. But never held the Miss Marple series quite in the same regard. That has several reasons.

First of all, I don't believe the series produced even a single masterpiece or something remotely close to the best, most well-known Hercule Poirot novels or standalone mysteries. Some point to A Murder is Announced (1950) as the Marple par excellence, "one of the best surprises in all Christiedom," but it can hardly be claimed it reached the same heights as Death on the Nile (1937) or And Then There Were None (1939). The Mirror Crack'd from Side to Side (1962) could have had a claim on the status of series classic had Christie not allowed the murderer to become mentally unhinged, muddle the plot with additional murders and ended up dulling the effect of the brilliantly conceived and motivated crime that opened the story. So what's left? The Body in the Library (1942), The Moving Finger (1943), They Do It with Mirrors (1952), A Pocket Full of Rye (1953) and 4.50 from Paddington (1957) are no better or worse than the average, mid-list Hercule Poirot title like Peril at End House (1932), Dumb Witness (1937) or Mrs. McGinty's Dead. The last four novels beginning with A Caribbean Mystery (1964) generally suffer from the decline in quality of late-period Christie. Secondly, I'm just not a big fan of the character or most spinster sleuth.

I prefer the American take on such characters, like Stuart Palmer's Miss Hildegarde Withers, Anita Blackmon's Miss Adelaide Adams and Torrey Chanslor's Beagle Sisters, who always have a little more of a bite to their personality. Their counterparts in Britain can often be a bit too precious and twee, while reeking of rose gardens and Werther's Originals. So never warmed to characters like Miss Marple or Patricia Wentworth's Miss Silver. I wanted to give Miss Marple a fair retrial as personal preferences, or prejudices, can not always escape the process of maturing and fine-tuning – memory is not always the most reliable record to draw from. Least of all mine. I really should have gone with the often recommended A Murder is Announced, but, despite all my gripes, there's actually one Miss Marple mystery I remember enjoying a lot. That has to do with the character of Miss Marple being very different and more interesting than the benevolent maiden aunt she would become in later stories.

Miss Jane Marple, of St. Mary Mead, Downshire, debuted in a series of short stories beginning with "The Tuesday Night Club" (1927) and were gathered under the title The Thirteen Problems (1932). The Murder at the Vicarage (1930) marked Miss Marple's first and only novel-length appearance until Christie revived the character twelve years later in The Body in the Library. Whose personality had altered considerably since The Murder at the Vicarage.

Miss Marple is "the worst cat in the village" who "always knows every single thing that happens" and "draws the worst inferences from it." A horrendously nosy, village gossip who boldly stands in her little garden with binoculars to do a spot of "bird watching." The birds in question being her neighbors and she made their study a hobby to pass the time. Miss Marple calls it observing human nature and in a small village there's ample opportunity to become proficient in one's study, "one begins to class people, quite definitely, just as though they were birds or flowers," which combined with a lifetime of experience allowed her to tackle small, quite unimportant and everyday mysteries – like "that matter of the changed cough drops" or "the butcher's wife's umbrella." I think Miss Marple cast as a gossip mongering busybody with an insatiable curiosity is a much more interesting and effective detective than the Aunt Jane who knits in a corner and quietly observes. The events leading up The Murder at the Vicarage and subsequent fallout gives Miss Marple enough to mull over in her first novel-length outing.

The narrator of The Murder at the Vicarage is the vicar of St. Mary Mead, Leonard Clement, who opens the story with the remark "that any one who murdered Colonel Protheroe would be doing the world at large a service."

Colonel Lucius Protheroe, churchwarden and local magistrate, is "the kind of man who enjoys making a fuss on every conceivable occasion" and gets an opportunity when a pound note disappeared from the offertory bag. So now he wants he wants to go over the church accounts, "in case of defalcations," but there's also trouble brewing closer to home. Lawrence Redding is a young painter who drifted into the village and is using a shed in the garden of the vicarage as a studio to paint a portrait of the vicar's wife, Griselda. When he's not working on the portrait, Redding is painting the colonel's daughter, Lettice, in her bathing dress. Colonel Protheroe found out and old worldly forbade the young artist the house. So the village gossip among each other if there's anything between Lawrence Redding and Lettice Protheroe, but Miss Marple believes the artist is likely involved with quite another person ("that kind of old cat is always right"). Miss Marple is proven correct when the vicar catches Redding in flagrante delicto with the colonel's wife, Anne Protheroe.

This "nasty tangle" finishes setting the stage for murder as, not long thereafter, the body of Colonel Protheroe is found in the vicar's study at the vicarage. Inspector Slack, "a man more determinedly strive to contradict his name," appears to have an open-and-shut case on his hands when Redding confesses to having shot Colonel Protheroe, but a second confession, medical evidence and two perfectly acceptable alibis topples his apple cart. So he has began all over again trying to piece together how a stopped desk clock running fifteen minutes fast ("to induce punctuality"), the scrawled letter the victim was writing with the time neatly printed at the top and the sound of a gunshot that was heard coming from the woods figure in the colonel's murder – which also brings some otherwise peripheral characters into view. Like a man named Archer, "an inveterate poacher," who had been sentenced several times by Colonel Protheroe in his role as magistrate. Dr. Stone, a well-known archaeologist, had recently arrived in the village to lead the excavation of a barrow on Colonel Protheroe's property, but there already been several disputes between the two. Mrs. Lestrange, "the Mystery Lady of St. Mary Mead," went to see Protheroe the night before he was killed. And nobody seems to have any idea what about. So "a lot of queer things about this case."

Miss Marple pops in and out of the story, often at the most opportune moments, until the time arrived to begin tidying up, but it was done in an incredibly anticlimactic way showing Christie was still a few years away from realizing her full potential. Miss Marple simply tells whodunit, why and how, which is then followed by an off-page scene in which the murderer falls into a police trap. It should have been done the other way round. The ending should have come with Miss Marple urging Slack to bait a trap without naming the murderer and concluding with the trap closing to reveal the (hopefully) surprising identity of the culprit, because it would immediately beg for an explanation. Miss Marple can then sit back and answer all the questions in the last chapter. It would have improved the ending considerably.

Regardless of the slightly anticlimactic ending and clues/red herrings not being as abundant as in coming novels, The Murder at the Vicarage is still a very good, solid and early example of the thoroughly British countryside mystery. More importantly, The Murder at the Vicarage gives the reader a glimpse of Christie testing and developing certain ideas that in the years ahead would shape some of her most celebrated and timeless detective novels. Not as polished or fine-tuned, of course, but a clear sign that both Christie and the detective story as a whole were about to go into full bloom. Just a shame this incarnation of the Miss Marple character was abandoned upon her return in The Body in the Library. We could have had a Miss Marple who steamed open letters in The Moving Finger to find out what being written in those scandalous poison pen letters.