Inspiring Older Readers
Murder at the Vicarage by Agatha Christie
I’ve been a voracious reader for over 40 years but I have to confess that, in all that time, I’ve never read (barely even considered reading) the best-selling novelist of all time – Agatha Christie. The statistics in terms of her authorship are remarkable:
- 75 novels
- 28 collections (including 165 short stories)
- Three poems
- 16 plays
- Seven radio broadcast works
- Two autobiographies
In addition to the extraordinary output, her readership figures are truly astonishing – over 3 billion books sold worldwide and, although this is almost impossible to confirm, the third best seller of all time after Shakespeare and The Bible.
And I’ve never read one. There has recently been a reprint of some of her more famous works in a facsimile edition that reproduces the original Collins Crime jackets and they are so well done I thought it might be a good reason to finally try one.
But where to start? There are so many and there’s also the issue of whether I go for a Jane Marple or an Hercule Poirot mystery – they are, after all, her most famous creations. Decisions, decisions.
And then fortune stepped in as I came across an article on the Mystery Scene website by Val McDermid, the great contemporary Scottish crime novelist, who, it turns out, is a great fan of Christie’s first Miss Marple mystery, Murder at the Vicarage:
“You only need a reading age of nine to understand Christie’s vocabulary and grammatical structures. I can’t be sure how old I was, but I was a precocious reader and I managed Miss Marple’s debut pretty well. Of course, I missed most of the subtleties of the adult behaviour and I certainly didn’t get Christie’s sly sense of humour. But what I got was the allure of a mystery nestled around with subplots galore, where everything worked out in the end. I was enthralled by it, and excited to see the page inside the book that listed the dozens of other books she’d written.”
OK, I thought, that’ll do for me.
The next problem is how to review a book like this and not spoil the working out of the mystery for anyone who hasn’t read it. Christie has often been described as ‘cosy crime’ – murder without the real nastiness of the deed itself – and the experience of reading the book is eerily close to some of the better television adaptations that are out there. The characters lack any real depth but they are not without presence and charm and the plot, for what it’s worth, is wholly focussed on the various twists, turns and red herrings that Christie relishes. She does all this, however, with consummate skill and the pages zip past as you sink into the 1930s period detail. And, of course, the police are ‘plods’ of the old school and show a remarkable willingness to chat freely about the murder case with anyone who expresses an interest. There’s no police tape, SWAT teams or CSI-style forensic investigations here.
The story is narrated by Leonard Clement, the vicar in whose vicarage the murder of Colonel Lucius Protheroe takes place and Jane Marple doesn’t make a significant appearance until well into the book and becomes central to the solution of the mystery only near the end. It’s interesting to see how the character of Miss Marple starts life – and it’s nothing like the image we later see emerge from the television adaptations. Here she’s much more integrated into the community of St.Mary Mead where she lives next door to the vicarage and is just one of a clutch of elderly spinsters who seem to know everyone’s business. Her more acute observational skills don’t become apparent until the mystery seems to have foxed the official channels.
Variations of the story of thwarted or secret love triangles, double identities, petty theft now seem two-a-penny and the plot of Murder at the Vicarage is, I imagine, the primary template for every episode of television's popular but risable, Midsomer Murders. Few of them, I suspect, do it as adroitly as Christie’s version and most of them don’t have the undercurrent of sly humour and social unorthodoxy that Christie slips into the text.
It is, of course, perfectly possible to read this tale at an entirely superficial level and be thoroughly entertained but it’s also true that there are some interesting messages (positive and negative) in here about social class, gender and age that aren’t, I think, being offered up as sociological musings but which come naturally out of Christie’s skill for constructing an almost perfectly hermetically sealed world of her own making.
It’s not a book that will take you long to read and the epithet ‘page-turner’ is a perfect description – you’ll zoom through it if you take to the style. I was surprised to find how much I enjoyed it as a light read. Grab a copy for the holidays.
Terry Potter
August 2018