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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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* Sept 25: The Mystery of the Blue Train (1928) by Agatha Christie
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What Members Thought

Dec 20, 2016 Susan rated it it was amazing

This first Miss Marple mystery is deceptively gentle, with much of the story narrated by the mild mannered vicar. When he returns to the vicarage to find the body of Colonel Protheroe shot in his study, the vicar becomes involved in the murder investigation, aided by his neighbour Miss Marple. There is a wonderful list of suspects, motives and false trails along the way, until Jane Marple untangles the threads and makes everything clear.

Not only is this a masterfully plotted story, but it introd ...more

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Dec 20, 2016 Lady Clementina ffinch-ffarowmore rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Revisit. Miss Marple’s first outing and my first read for a Miss Marple Challenge in 2017. Miss Marple shares with Poirot that when you look at either of them (an old ‘fluffy’ lady in a little English village or a perhaps deliberately, funny looking ‘furriner’), one wouldn’t think them detectives. But her sharp observation skills and vast knowledge of human nature ensure that she has the right answer every time, be the crime small or as grave as a murder. This one sees the less than well liked c ...more

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Apr 14, 2018 Kavita rated it it was amazing

Shelves: golden-age-mystery, mystery, uk, jazz-age

The first appearance of Miss Marple is in Murder at the Vicarage and the old lady has not had enough experience and hence lacks the confidence. The narrator is the vicar, which works very well for this book and gave it a bit of a Roger Ackroyd feel. I think this is perhaps one of the best Marple books in the series, even though her involvement is not so intense. But she is the one who solves the mystery that stumps the good inspector!

The vicar is called away on a wild goose chase and when he ret ...more

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Feb 17, 2013 Susan rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

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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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Oct 12, 2015 Ellen rated it it was amazing

Shelves: mystery-cozy, mystery-sleuth, my-favorites, christie, miss-marple

Murder at the Vicarage by Agatha Christie.

The Vicar, Mr. Clement, has his hands full with Colonel Protheroe having been murdered at the Vicarage. The list of suspects has no end since the colonel had hardly a single friend amongst the towns people. Then enters Miss Marple in her very first appearance.

This story had a slow start buy kept me riveted to each passing page. Miss Marple was mostly in the background until the end which I found splendiferous!

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

Shelves: mystery, agatha-christie, vintage-mystery, bought-2018, british-mystery, 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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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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