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Murder at the Vicarage (Miss Marple, #1)

Agatha Christie

Start date: January 1, 2017

Finish date: January 31, 2017

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Feb 05, 2017 Christine PNW rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: vintage-women

One of my reading projects for 2017 is the Miss Marple series by Agatha Christie. I've read a number of them already, but some of them it has been a very long time. I've never been as fond of Jane Marple as I am of Hercule Poirot.

However, I want to talk about a thing that happened to me in December. My office had put together an elimination of bias training for the lawyers. The training was presented by a psychologist who works for the University of Oregon - and he started the training by talkin One of my reading projects for 2017 is the Miss Marple series by Agatha Christie. I've read a number of them already, but some of them it has been a very long time. I've never been as fond of Jane Marple as I am of Hercule Poirot.

However, I want to talk about a thing that happened to me in December. My office had put together an elimination of bias training for the lawyers. The training was presented by a psychologist who works for the University of Oregon - and he started the training by talking about bias in the context of the human brain. He went on to talk about how the human brain is absolutely masterful at categorizing things - our minds can observe a penguin, an eagle, an ostrich and a finch, and we immediately recognize and categorize all of them as birds although they bear very little physical resemblance to one another. From an evolutionary perspective, this is a remarkable feat. He talked about how easy it would be to write a computer program to recognize the color blue in an image, and how difficult it would be to write a computer program to recognize a bird in an image because computers aren't nearly as good at categorizing things as the human brain.

This is all super interesting as it relates to bias, of course, because our brains are constantly categorizing things - including people - and if we aren't careful with our categorizing it can turn into unconscious (or conscious) discrimination.

As he was explaining all of this, I had this personal moment of geek, where I thought to myself - aha. That's exactly what Agatha Christie has Miss Marple doing. She is exercising her skills of categorization in ways that are simultaneously broader and narrower than the way that an average person categorizes. Marple doesn't categorize by social class or sex or wealth so much as she categorizes by event and psychology, drawing parallels between, perhaps, the fish monger's crush on a post mistress and the murderer's attraction to the victim's sister.

All of this is simply to say that Agatha Christie was clearly a woman ahead of her time. I did manage to keep my mouth shut during the training, and not burst out with "OMG, that's exactly what Miss Marple does, except it's different because . . ." and out myself as the total dork that I am. I was pretty proud of myself for that.

Anyway, about this book. It's fine - introducing us to Miss Jane Marple, who isn't nearly as sweet as you think she is. ...more

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May 16, 2011 Abbey rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: myst-set-andor-auth-uk, reviewed, vintage, myst-fems-project, series, myst-cosies, own, sell

1930, #1 Miss Jane Marple, St. Mary Mead, rural England
wise elderly spinster lady solves a tricky murder; truly deserves the label "classic cosy". Tame, quiet, and sweet, but there are some interesting edges to it as well. Not to be missed.

When Colonel Protheroe, irascible church deacon and Big Wig in Town, gets himself messily murdered at the vicar's own desk in his beloved study, it seems things can't get much worse for our kindly narrator the vicar and his young wife. But the villagers are s 1930, #1 Miss Jane Marple, St. Mary Mead, rural England
wise elderly spinster lady solves a tricky murder; truly deserves the label "classic cosy". Tame, quiet, and sweet, but there are some interesting edges to it as well. Not to be missed.

When Colonel Protheroe, irascible church deacon and Big Wig in Town, gets himself messily murdered at the vicar's own desk in his beloved study, it seems things can't get much worse for our kindly narrator the vicar and his young wife. But the villagers are scandalized, and the police aren't exactly nice, or thoughtful or very intelligent, come to think on it. Circumstances rapidly deteriorate around the village, with many old secrets coming to light, as Miss Marple slowly puts the clues and little bits and pieces together to make a whole, coherent story - and its rather a sad one, at the end.

The characters: a murder victim you love to hate; a reliable, likable, rather "null" narrator; his almost batty - and extremely entertaining - wife; the victim's peculiar daughter and cold wife; numerous shady villagers; even odder summer visitors to the village; and Miss Jane Marple, who sees pretty much everything, has an opinion on almost everyone, and while having exquisitely fine-tuned manners, manages to get her points across very clearly. The vicar describes her thusly, during teatime at the vicarage:

"I shook hands all round and sat down between Miss Marple and Miss Weatherby. Miss Marple is a white-haired old lady with a gentle, appealing manner – Miss Weatherby is a mixture of vinegar and gush. Of the two Miss Marple is much the more dangerous."

Christie's touch is very light, and this is almost as funny in places as her more-deliberately-farcical Tommy and Tuppence stories were. Miss Marple has some really lovely lines that have nicely sharp edges to them, and of all the actresses to have tried that role, Joan Hickson managed to deliver them the best. A genteel sensibility does not mean blameless innocence or stupidity, and there aren't many people around her that are as sharp as Miss Jane. Plus the vicar's narration is beautifully droll, with a dry humor that is very entertaining, and his pragmatism makes a nice counterpoint to the sweetness. It's surprising how many of the interesting interpersonal things that are going on in St. Mary Mead that he remarks upon are still happening in small towns or large neighborhoods today - people don't change much, do they, when it comes to emotions? And the hot-house atmosphere of a small village truly incubates intensity and drama. It's all dressed up rather gently here, though, and that's one of the things I enjoy best about most of the mysteries written in this style "between the wars".

MURDER AT THE VICARAGE has often been copied, and never quite equaled, except IMO by Gladys Mitchell in SALTMARSH MURDERS, 1932, her third novel. It's a deliberate parody of VICARAGE while also being a good murder mystery of its own, filled with deliciously salacious innuendo and odd bits. Ms. Mitchell's writing is not to everyone's taste, perhaps, but for me her books are always a lot of fun. Her Mrs Bradley is, as written, a true "anti-Marple" and not at all the genteel over-the-hill flapper shown on TV.

VICARAGE is that rare thing - a sweet-tempered, well-plotted rural village murder mystery, filled with odd characters, sad histories, and a very nice Lady at the center of it all, with everything "played fair". Something to definitely be enjoyed, yes, even almost a century after its first publication.

[NOTE: The remainder is just me waffling on about "older detectives"]:

While Miss Marple was not the first of the "elderly lady amateur detectives", she is certainly the most famous, known to almost everyone who has read murder mysteries, whether they read cosies or not. Preceded by Patricia Wentworth's Miss Silver in novel form in 1928 (GREY MASK) - Miss Marple's first short story wasn't published until December, 1928 (The Tuesday Night Club). And the comparison is inexact as Miss Silver, while being as nearly Victorian appearing as Miss Marple initially was described (fussy, frail, liking to knit, etc), was an actual private detective or "Enquiry Agent" as she often called herself - she worked to solve crimes, and was mostly paid for that work. Jane Marple did not accept payment and would have been horrified if anyone even suggested such a thing to her.

And pre-dating both of those is Dorothy L. Sayers' Miss Climpson, who works for Lord Peter, gathering intelligence in several of his novels beginning in UNNATURAL DEATH, 1927, although she is an older woman, she isn't exactly elderly, even by criteria of the time - she appears to be in her early fifties; that would be equivalent to someone who is in her mid-to-late 60s nowadays.

But the concept of crime-solving older - and sometimes downright elderly - ladies far pre-dates both of them as this was, and continued for several decades to be, an extremely popular style of mystery (i.e., Stuart Palmer's Miss Withers and several of Phoebe Atwood Taylor's books, both in the 1930s, and numerous HIBK-style stories in the 1940s, 50s and 60s). The earliest one I can think of would be several of Mary Roberts Rineheart's narrators, starting in 1908 with THE CIRCULAR STAIRCASE. And as baby boomers (and thus the reading public, including myself) age, the "older sleuth" has again become extremely popular over the last ten or so years. ...more

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Aug 16, 2020 Bev rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: british-mystery, bought-2018, vintage-mystery, mystery, agatha-christie, mount-tbr-2020

Miss Marple is a white-haired old lady with a gentle, appealing manner--Miss Weatherby is a mixture of vinegar and gush. Of the two Miss Marple is much the more dangerous.

And so we get the first glimpse of Miss Jane Marple, spinster and student of humanity, in her very first novel. She arrives on the scene for a dose of "tea and scandal at four-thirty" in the vicarage drawing-room where the ladies of the village gather to share their weekly observations of their neighbors. Some relish in the for Miss Marple is a white-haired old lady with a gentle, appealing manner--Miss Weatherby is a mixture of vinegar and gush. Of the two Miss Marple is much the more dangerous.

And so we get the first glimpse of Miss Jane Marple, spinster and student of humanity, in her very first novel. She arrives on the scene for a dose of "tea and scandal at four-thirty" in the vicarage drawing-room where the ladies of the village gather to share their weekly observations of their neighbors. Some relish in the forbidden nature of gossip. Some are truly vicious in their comments. But Miss Marple is just plain interested in what makes her neighbors tick. She enjoys observing little things that help her solve the little puzzles of village life. She's often wondered if solving a really wicked crime could work in the same way.

She certainly gets a chance to find out when Colonel Protheroe, a very unpopular church warden and magistrate, is found shot to death in the vicar's study. Miss Marple isn't the only one interested in the murder. The Vicar's nephew is just at the age to think it's ripping great fun and decides to play detective himself--hunting for clues and discovering footprints.

At Dennis's age a detective story is one of the best things in life, and to find a real detective story, complete with corpse, waiting on one's own front doorstep, so to speak, is bound to send a healthy-minded boy into the seventh heaven of enjoyment.

They each have a go at solving the mystery, though Miss Marple is the more dedicated of the two (Dennis is slightly distracted by Protheroe's beautiful daughter). There are conflicting bits of evidence: a clock that doesn't tell the time that it should, a note that couldn't have been written when it says it was, a shot heard in the woods--but not in the house, two separate confessions to the murder, and an attempt to plant some incriminating evidence. And, since the colonel was disliked by so many, there are plenty of suspects. There's his current wife, who discovered quite quickly that Protheroe was not at all easy to live with. And his daughter, Lettice, who doesn't like being ordered about. There's the young poacher who got a stiff sentence and has vowed revenge. There's artist who has been painting Lettice's portrait (she in her bathing dress!) and has been forbidden the house. And there's the mysterious Mrs. Lestrange, a true stranger to the area, who paid a call on the colonel one evening when his wife was not home. Why, even the Vicar was heard to declare before the actual event "that anyone who murdered Colonel Protheroe would be doing the world at large a service."

I've thoroughly enjoyed the Agatha Christie challenge which has me reading all of her mysteries in publication order--something I had never done before. When I first discovered her novels, I just read whatever I could find in whatever order I could find it. And I thoroughly enjoyed this first novel-length glimpse of Miss Marple. She, as Christie fans know, has a knack of figuring out who-dunnit by association. Certain habits or turns of phrase or ways of doing things remind her of something or someone completely different--and yet the association leads her unerringly to the culprit. I love watching her disclose her insights to the Vicar or Inspector Slack...or Colonel Melchett (the Chief Constable).

It was also interesting to see Miss Marple and village life through the eyes of the Vicar (our narrator). He doesn't see things as clearly as he thinks, but that helps the red herrings along. His interactions with all of the characters give readers a lot to think about when trying to figure out who-dunnit themselves. ★★★★ for a lovely Golden Age visit with Christie's characters.

First posted on my blog My Reader's Block. Please request permission before reposting portions of review. Thanks. ...more

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Oct 12, 2021 Bev rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: mystery, vintage-mystery, british-mystery, agatha-christie, bought-2016

see review other edition

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Jan 11, 2017 Ellie Oberth rated it really liked it

I love Agatha Christie

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Jan 21, 2017 Deborah added it

Shelves: marple-challenge

It's been a while since I read Christie. This is the first Miss Marple book. Really enjoyed it although Miss Marple is just beginning to be fleshed out. ...more

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Feb 01, 2017 michelle+8 rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: 2017

One of the things I really enjoy about the Father Brown mysteries is that he is often not the main character. Sometimes you'd hardly know the series was about him, until the end of a story. (In one story, he's basically a background character with only one line, until the end where he simply follows the murderer home and asks for a confession.) Christie has done the same thing with Miss Marple. She's just one of several gossipy old ladies in the narrator's neighborhood, until you slowly realize ...more

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