Rediscovering Miss Marple Transcript

Caroline: Some characters are so popular and recognisable that they can become detached from their point of origin. Miss Marple is such a one. There were elderly women sleuths before her, but every single village busybody who solves crimes since has existed in her shadow. Her stories and novels are so widespread, and there have been so many adaptations that that one name — Marple — means something to people all over the world.

I've consumed so many iterations and versions of Miss Marple over the years, from the iconic Joan Hickson portrayal of the 1980s to the Japanese anime she shared with Hercule Poirot in the 2000s. But it's been a long time since I went back to the source and reacquainted myself with Agatha Christie's Miss Marple. Let's go and meet St Mary Mead's most famous spinster together, shall we?

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Welcome to Shedunnit. I'm Caroline Crampton.

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Some of my favourite projects that I undertake for Shedunnit are the ones where I read a lot of books, either on a particular theme, by a certain author, or across a stated time period, and turn my findings into an episode. Sometimes, though, I want to zoom in on just one title and consider all aspects of it, without the pressure to compare and contrast. This latter approach feels like the right way to get reacquainted with Miss Marple.

But which book? It really had to be The Murder at the Vicarage, Miss Marple's first novel-length adventure, which was first published in 1930. Of course, this was not her first appearance in print. That had been in a short story titled "The Tuesday Night Club.” It was published in The Royal Magazine in December 1927, and five years later collected in a volume sometimes titled The Tuesday Night Club and sometimes The Thirteen Problems, depending on where and when you were buying it.

This book felt like the right choice for a deeper look at Miss Marple not only because it was her first full-length case, but also because it contains so many of the details that were to become indelibly associated with her: it's set in the village of St Mary Mead, it focuses on a murder that is committed within that small community, and Miss Marple investigates using her twin weapons of old biddy inquisitiveness and astonishing deductive leaps.

Interestingly, the reviews for The Murder at the Vicarage when it first appeared were not particularly good — it's fascinating, I think, to look at how something very famous was first received, before it commanded any kind of cultural reputation. Some American critics found Christie’s chosen culprit to be hard to believe and the solution anti-climactic. The British newspapers were slightly more favourable reactions, using words like “bewilderment” and “bafflement.” Harold Nicolson wrote in the Daily Express, “I have read better works by Agatha Christie, but that does not mean that this last book is not more cheerful, more amusing, and more seductive than the generality of detective novels.” So not his favourite Christie, but still a strong work of crime fiction. I can't wait to get into it.

My production assistant Leandra Griffith is joining me for this conversation, and she has special expertise in this book, having written her masters thesis partially about it. I also want to warn you that there are going to be spoilers throughout this conversation, so if you haven't read the book and don't want to hear discussion of the full plot yet please pause here and come back when you are ready.

We actually recorded this back in April, when the Shedunnit Book Club was reading The Murder at the Vicarage as its chosen book for the month, so members have already heard a much longer, almost hour-long, version of this episode. Leandra and I make long conversational episodes like this every month discussing the club's book of choice, so if you like us talking about books, you might want to consider becoming a member so you can hear more of it. Find out more and sign up at shedunnitbookclub.com/join.

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I feel like a good place to start with this book, which is a very familiar one in the Christie canon, is to talk about how recently we actually read this book. Because for me, I realised it had been a while. How about for you?

Leandra: This was the book I focused on for my master's thesis. While that's still pretty recent, having read this only a couple years ago, it felt like a lovely refresher because I had given myself a proper space to kind of forget things, forget how analytical I could be about this specific text. And so I was just able to enjoy the narrative. How about you?

Caroline: I can't actually pinpoint when I last read this book, but I'm going to guess it was at least a decade.

Leandra: Oh, wow.

Caroline: It's been a long time, and I didn't realise quite how long it had been since I actually read it again, because there were lots of things about this book that felt unfamiliar, that I wasn't expecting. For instance, the fact that it is first person narrated by the vicar of the Vicarage in the title, I had completely forgotten this fact because first person narration is not something Christie does a huge amount. She does do it a bit, obviously with some very famous examples, but it's not her default mode.

I had forgotten as well, the low level animosity other characters display towards Miss Marple. I had forgotten how a lot of the Christie lore about St Mary Mead and her sort of knowingness about detective fiction isn't really present in this book yet.

It's still only 1930. It's the very end of the 1920s that she's writing this book. So it felt more alien to me, I think, than I was expecting, given my familiarity with it as this notable first Miss Marple full length. I don't think I've read this book while I've been making Shedunnit and I started making Shedunnit in 2018.

Leandra: I agree this is a refreshing narration style because Agatha Christie really doesn't play around with first person too often. And when she does though, as you said, with very popular, well-known titles, it isn't the detective that we're following.

It's always this Watson, Hastings like character. And that's what we get with the vicar. I also this month ended up rereading The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, and I loved the connections I was making when I was considering Caroline as a character in that book, because I'm pretty sure Agatha Christie said that she was inspired by Caroline's character to make Miss Marple.

And like you said, the animosity is there and I definitely remember there being some animosity by the narrator towards Caroline, his sister in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, and that's definitely translated into Miss Marple with everyone finding her very nosey, knowing everything, and hating that about her because she's just too good at it.

Caroline: She did say exactly that. I made a note of this. It's from her autobiography. She says: "I think it is possible that Miss Marple arose from the pleasure I had taken in portraying Dr Shepherd's sister in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. She had been my favorite character in the book an acidulated spinster, full of curiosity, knowing everything, hearing everything, the complete detective service in the home."

She really enjoyed writing this one-off character in that book and decided to take those character traits a bit further and hence Miss Marple. So yeah, that was a really interesting origin point. And a fun thing to read alongside each other, I would expect.

Leandra: I just kept finding connections and remembering how brilliant Caroline is a character in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, I love both of these women and I love how they just get into everyone's lives. And you know what? There are a lot of people within both books for them to investigate secrets. Is it really Miss Marple or Caroline's fault that they just have so many secrets to uncover? Or is it the fact that it's the village that is just brimming with scandal and drama.

Caroline: Exactly. I was very struck by that reading The Murder at the Vicarage, because Miss Marple has a very interesting view on morality and people's habits of concealment. And something else that I found in Christie's autobiography really spoke to this. She talks a bit later on about how Miss Marple was also in a way inspired by her grandmother. Not physically, though she's keen to point out, 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."

And we can absolutely see in this book that Miss Marple has that characteristic. The vicar, I think, says that about her multiple times.

Oh, Miss Marple, she's usually right when she makes some doom laden prophecy about how something will turn out for someone, or she's seems to just be speculating, just guessing. And then she's proved right. And I thought that was very interesting that that was something Christie drew from life, that that was an older woman's outlook.

I've seen a lot of things. I'm good at observing. I'm good at reading human nature. People think they can hide things from me, but I can tell. That's definitely, I think how Miss Marple comes across is that although she is frequently referred to as a gossip, and a spinster who's far too interested in other people's business.

I don't know that we see that much evidence of her being an actual gossip rather than her just being interested and observing of her fellow humans. And then frighteningly good at interpreting what they're really up to.

Leandra: We can definitely see that where she isn't malicious and even though we are comparing her to a character from The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, I feel as though she isn't as rude as Caroline can be sometimes as being quite blunt and having the goal of showing that she is the smartest person in the room that knows everything.

I don't think that Miss Marple does that. In fact, it really, I blame people for misinterpreting some of the things that she says. We see multiple times in this book where she pats people on the shoulder saying, oh dear, you're so innocent. I think she does that to the Vicar's wife. She also does that to some of the law enforcement that she interacts with, telling them that they just haven't experienced the world as she has, and so they have a far more optimistic view on people's intentions, and so we definitely see that in this book. But additionally, Miss Marple oftentimes isn't speaking directly, and maybe that's where the miscommunication comes in.

Even in the opening scene, we have her comparing certain scenarios in the present to experiences she had in the past, and even the vicar misinterprets her. I think at one point she is remembering a scandal from years past where a man is assuming that his daughter is having an affair with someone. It ends up turning out that it's the man's wife who was having this affair.

And Miss Marple says, you know, you'd be surprised, it was the wife that time, and she looks pointedly at Griselda, the Vicar's wife, and immediately he thinks she's accusing my wife of cheating on me. And he gets flustered and frustrated. And the thing is, is she wasn't being malicious.

She's actually suggesting that that might be happening elsewhere in the village. It speaks to the fact that a lot of our characters think that they're the centre of the story. I think the vicar is at fault at that sometimes, and so he takes things very personally when in reality Miss Marple isn't even speaking about you.

Caroline: That's such a good point. I want to pick up on what you said there about the Vicar, because having completely forgotten that this was a first person narrated book. I know we did discuss it when we did the episode talking about your thesis a couple of years ago, but I've made a lot of episodes since then. I can't be expected to remember everything I've ever said.

And not only is he the first person narrator, he is a fascinating psychology, I think because for all that he joins in with these other men talking about the terrible profusion of spinsters in the village. He is the fussiest and most self-centred character in this book.

He's always grumbling about how the dinner is bad because the maid is lazy and tea doesn't happen on time. And oh, if only we could have less chewy meat. Very crotchety, domestic grumblings. And then, yes, he also does plenty of times exactly the thing that you're describing, where he takes something that someone else is doing. Or an indication that is about something else, and he thinks it's about him. He lives for the drama and he thinks he's the centre of the drama, when actually he is barely on the periphery. And he is included though in the crime and investigation in a way that Miss Marple is not. And again, these are, I think, interesting choices that Christie made for the first novel length outing of a new character.

Perhaps we can interpret that she didn't know or wasn't sure yet that she was going to write lots more Miss Marple novels, and she was just doing what she thought best served this particular story. But to have your detective, Miss Marple is ultimately the successful detective of this novel, but to have her only appear through somebody else's eyes.

And have that somebody else be someone who's given access to crime scenes, who is taken into the confidence of the police and other authority figures while Miss Marple is reduced to listening to things over walls and quietly knocking and asking if she could possibly come in and share her thoughts is very interesting. It feels like almost for a detective novelist, she was deliberately making life hard for herself, wouldn't you say?

Leandra: I completely agree, and I think what's really fun is, like you said, to compare the vicar to Miss Marple in that he is mixed up in the scandal and the drama himself, but in a different way.

It's just that it's easier for him to get the information. I mean, people are coming to him obviously because of his profession, because of the place that he sits in the community, and so they're just offering him the scandal. Whereas really, Miss Marple's the one who's got to put in the work. She has to interpret people and try to figure out what exactly they're hiding, whereas the vicar just has access to that.

It doesn't hurt that the murder happened in the vicarage itself. But it would be interesting to consider how the story would change if we were following it from Miss Marple's perspective, whether it be first person or maybe third person omniscient.

Caroline: I looked up some reviews of the book when it first came out, and for instance, the New York Times complained that it contained "too much of the local sisterhood of spinsters, the average reader is apt to grow weary of it all".

This was quite a common criticism in people liked the plot, they liked the setting, but they thought there was too much attention given to this particular type of character. It's true, there are several spinsters in the village. They all have their little part to play, Miss Marple chief among them.

I thought that was interesting that critics particularly recoiled from that when actually Miss Marple herself seems to have been quite an instant hit with readers in the sense that Christie clearly felt fine about writing more books about her.

One person though was immediately a fan, and I thought, this is very interesting.

Dorothy L. Sayers wrote to Agatha Christie after the book came out. And she said: "Dear old tabbies are the only possible right kind of female detective. I think this is the best you've done." And I found that so interesting.

Dorothy L. Sayers in 1930 is writing Harriet Vane, her own female detective character. The first book starring her comes out that year and she's obviously thinking about the roles that women inhabit in society that plausibly allow them to take on this mantle of detective. And she thinks that Agatha Christie's hit on a really, really good way of doing it. So yeah, that was very intriguing to me, that one kind of critic really didn't like it, and then a colleague really, really did.

Leandra: I absolutely love that quote from Dorothy L. Sayers. I'm so glad that she wrote that to Agatha Christie, and it'd be interesting to consider her own reactions to Sayers saying that because that truly is high praise and I fully agree. What I think is funny about that criticism saying, oh, there's so many spinsters about and so many elderly women.

But when you look at it, first and foremost, we have a huge character list in this book. There are so many characters in general, and to say that there are too many elderly women on the page, I think is completely inaccurate because we also have quite a few young women. I mean, we end up having Mrs Protheroe, we have Griselda, we have Lettice, and then we also have this group of men who are investigating. So I think that when you're proportionately considering how many characters are actually in this very short novel to say that there are too many older women, that is completely false and just shows what this critic was arguing is that I'd rather see no elderly women because they're definitely not the majority or even half of the characters in this book.

Caroline: Definitely, yes. I think it is one of those cases where it is more revealing of the prejudices of the writer than the work under critique. I think it's interesting what you say there about this is quite a stacked character list.

There are a lot of people, and they all play a part in this book. Because also looking at Christie's own reactions to this book, she later revisited it and she said: "I'm not so pleased with it as I was at the time. It has, I think, far too many characters and too many subplots, but at any rate, the main plot is sound."

I thought that was very interesting that she made that assessment. Obviously, she agrees with you that there are too many characters and there are a lot of subplots. We have a romantic plot. We have obviously the principal murder. Then we later on have an attempted murder in order to cover things up. We have people confessing to the crime and then detectives showing that actually their confessions aren't plausible and all this kind of stuff.

There's also a burglary subplot as well, so there is a lot going on, perhaps more than what you might think of as in your average Christie mystery, and I honestly can't say why that is, because Christie had been writing detective novels for 10 years at this point. So it's not like she was inexperienced.

I think she just had a very certain image of where she wanted to end up, and in order to get there, she found herself hitting a lot of extra material, if that makes sense. She couldn't see her way to the solution she wanted without including all these other details.

Leandra: Right. And there is the suggestion that maybe her strategy was to show that everyone is hiding something. It's just that not every secret is linked to the murder, but there are moments where you don't really maybe question it as it's happening, but once you get to the solution and you look back at some of these scenarios, you're thinking, why did we have to spend time on that? I think reading it now in 2025, we can agree with Agatha Christie that there probably was too much happening, but I was happy to read it anyway.

Caroline: I think what happened is that she overdeveloped the red herrings. You could see a way of doing this where she wanted to develop of course the potential for alternative suspects. But I think she went a bit too far. She fleshed out their backstories a bit too much.

And so they ceased to be just possibilities hinted at, and they became fully realised alternative plots. She calls them subplots. So that would be my guess as to what happened. Maybe in later works, she became a bit defter at sketching in the suggestion of somebody's potential as the culprit without actually needing to explain all of the context as to why it might be them, if that makes sense.

Leandra: I also just remembered another strange red herring that ended up happening, which was the prank phone calls. I completely forgot about that when I was reading this and I was trying to think, where is this going because I completely forgot and couldn't remember why they were happening.

Caroline: Yes, you're right. That is another plot that whizzes past you at high speed, and you almost don't have time to give it any consideration because on the next page, you're already into another one. So yeah, it feels very compressed in lots of ways. She's trying to cram lots and lots of different things in. So I think we agree, therefore with Christie's later in life assessment, that there were too many subplots, too many characters.

The other thing that I had not remembered about this book when I came to it this time is that it doesn't have a lot of description in it. I think partly through later work by Christie and then also very much through television and film adaptations, we carry this very fleshed out version of Miss Marple's world in our minds, St Mary Mead and all of its surroundings. But actually there is almost no description of it in this book. There is no description of what the village layout is what the streets look like, what the church looks like, really what anybody's house even looks like.

We hear a lot about Miss Marple's garden, but we don't know what it looks like. We know that she has a rockery and she has some roses because those end up being slightly relevant to the plot. We don't know anything about the rest of it. Does she live in a tiny cottage? Does she live in a substantial house? Who knows? And yet, because of all of the hinterland that the character and the stories have, it's almost like we, our minds just fill that in.

Even though it's not there on the page. So yeah, I found that to be a very interesting experience reading it this time. And it did make me wonder like if I'd read this book in 1930 when it first came out.

Leandra: Obviously these books are quite short and we have so much plot to focus on, but with this one, I think that Agatha Christie was just more intrigued by the interpersonal relationships that you find in this village, especially when considering a heinous crime that has happened and the piece of the village is disturbed because there is a lot of dialogue, there's a lot of conversation.

We learn a lot about people's connections to others, and that just seemed to be her focus rather than discussing any type of setting or going too deep into descriptions. We don't even get serious descriptions of the people themselves. But I do think that we see the people more than we actually see where they are in time and place.

So that is quite fascinating to consider. But I suppose what's more important and what is linked to the plot as far as why did this murder occur, when did it occur, who could be behind this crime? It is more important for us to understand the descriptions that are involving people's relationships to each other than the village itself and what it looks like.

But it is fascinating to consider, did she purposely want to make it seem like any old village that anyone could relate to it, or did she just find it not to be that important to describe?

Caroline: Yeah, I think it, it's some version of that. I think once she said it's a village, everybody was supposed to immediately be able to picture what that meant, and probably they could in 1930. We have the vague sense that this is a village in the south of England somewhere and that's all you need to know. As a side note, I think it's very intriguing that the first novels of both Poirot and Marple have basically the same plot. As do several other of her quite famous books, and no one seems to mind or even really notice that that's the case.

Leandra: I'm glad that you made the connection to The Mysterious Affair at Styles because I don't think you notice it when you're reading the two books, but they do have similar bones.

They are very similar stories in various ways, even though they're also very different and I think it's very funny that they both are the start of a detective's journey into more cases. because obviously this was the first case following Poirot and then we also have the first case following Miss Marple in novel length form. And so it's fascinating that Christie decided to start both of these detectives' journeys in a very similar way.

Caroline: Yes. This is something that I think John Curran gets at really well in his edited edition of Christie's Secret Notebooks. He notes the differences and similarities between plots and their construction a lot, and he points out that this book actually had its origins in a Satterthwaite and Quinn short story from 1926 called "The Love Detectives", in that two adulterous lovers commit, murder, and then confess separately confident that if their confessions are unbelievable, neither will actually be believed and then they will be discounted from the investigation. That's pretty much exactly what happened in The Murder at the Vicarage, and she'd used a very similar technique in The Mysterious Affair at Styles.

It is written differently. The characters are very different, but that central mechanism of an adulterous couple kills the inconvenient spouse, and then uses confession as a tool to try and get out of the investigation is similar. It goes further in Styles of course, because there is, I think, an arrest or a near arrest or Poirot prevents the arrest, but the police get close to doing it.

What John Curran then also points out that she does it again at least three more times. I'm not going to say what they are in case people are worried about spoilers for other books, but there are at least three other Christie novels that use this exact technique as well, and a few short stories. And this is so interesting to think about when you are reading Christie, especially if you're someone who's read a lot of her before, that beyond the world of people who love and appreciate detective fiction from this period, I think there is a standard thing that people say about Agatha Christie. They're wrong, but they say. "Oh, she wasn't much of a writer. Her prose is very boring. It's not very well written (wrong), but she was a great creator of plots. She was highly ingenious and her plots are without parallel and that's what she should really be celebrated for." And yeah, she was great at plots. I also happened to think she was a pretty good writer too, but she also was very good at repeating plots and not having people realise that she was doing that.

Leandra: Yeah, it's almost like writing your signature, but in different fonts.

Caroline: Yeah.

Leandra: At its core they're very similar, but really the dressing is completely different. I recently read The Pale Horse for the first time, and there are some really thoughtful descriptions and discussions about technology, especially because of when it was written, where it was written in her canon as far as being part of her latter half of writing and her contemplating what it means to be entering a new age.

And I was thinking maybe Christie should have wrote science fiction too. Like I would've thought that that was very fascinating how she is able to contemplate where society is going. And I think that this book is a perfect example, as mentioned about discussing relationships and how they impact each other. So anyone who argues that Christie can't write, I, I think that they aren't paying attention to the right passages.

Caroline: Definitely, there's plenty of isolated sentences and paragraphs that you can point to in all sorts of books. But then I also think there are structural trends across her whole career, such as we've just been saying about the fact that she was able to repeat the same plots in different fonts in different books and have them be utterly successful.

Not just okay, but really brilliant. I think she was a much more versatile and skilled writer than she even herself gave herself credit for, as it were.

Leandra: I completely agree. And even when we're thinking about one, the consideration of how many different types of sleuths or detectives she wrote, all of them are very different from each other. It would be interesting to place them all in a room and see how they interact with each other. If we're actually thinking about even the Miss Marple canon, she also switches things up.

I'm considering The Murder at the Vicarage in comparison to The Body in the Library. Those are structurally very different. The narration styles are completely different. The Body in the Library is third person, from multiple POVs, like we're jumping heads and trying to look at the investigation from various angles and people's perspectives.

And so Christie, even within her canon of one detective, is being versatile and changing things up. So that in itself shows that Christie is quite versatile in her writing, even when it comes down to the narration style as well.

Caroline: Yes. Another thing that is, I think, a bit unusual about this book compared to other Marple novels, other Christie novels, is that it's a gun mystery. This is a shooting. And the fact that it is a shooting is very important to the plot because quite a lot of the procedural stuff turns on the fact that, you know, did anybody hear the shot? Where did the cartridge go? Where was the gun put afterwards? Who was holding it? All this kind of stuff, which you just don't get with poison or a blunt instrument or the other various weapons that Christie wrote about. She does turn the various physical manifestations of a firearm to her advantage.

Confusing the matter over who could have heard the shot, why didn't they, all this stuff about the time and the clock is all very important to the plot's mechanism.

I think she was trying a lot of different things in this book. I think that's why it surprised me upon this re-encounter, because she'd had this very successful decade where she had done a few of the same things. She'd written a few more adventure based thriller stories. She'd written a lot of short stories. She'd established Poirot as a character. She'd had a huge success with The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.

I think at the end of the decade she was looking for a new challenge and she was wondering, what if I wrote from the first person of a character, no one's ever met before and will probably never meet again? What if I centred a mystery around a gun? What if I created this new sleuth who won't even be on the page for about half the book, and yet will solve it all at the end? I like to think that this was Christie spreading her wings and amusing herself a bit.

I think that's where I wanted to land in this episode is considering this as the first Miss Marple book. And trying to read it like you've never read any of the others, which isn't of course really possible, but trying to think about coming to it cold without any of this other knowledge, would you have finished the book and gone, wow, this character has legs I must have 11 more books featuring her, do you think?

Leandra: That's actually a really good question because it's something that obviously is a hypothetical question because we know for a fact that she did go on to write more novels for Miss Marple. I feel as though the critics, the reviewers that we referenced probably are accurate in what people were assuming at the time is that I don't think a lot of people would have actually taken too much thought into MS as a character who had such potential to go on to have other cases and be this really impactful character within Christie's canon.

I'm so glad that Christie did, but because Miss Marple does act almost as a secondary character throughout most of the book until the end where she has her shining moment to prove to everyone that she has been watching and that this could not have been solved without her help.

I feel as though a lot of people on first reading may not recognise unless they're told to look for it how strong and impactful and thoughtful this character is, and even just the plot itself, like the plot has so much going on. The only reason why we're able to sort it all out in the end is because Christie helps us do that. I think that this is a book that gets overlooked sometimes. I think Miss Marple sometimes gets overlooked in general, but this one in particular, people might start with it and enjoy it, but they don't really think too critically like we're doing right now, and it's so rich. There's still so much that we haven't even been able to talk about or cover in discussing this novel.

So even if there's probably a lot of people who are listening right now saying, no, actually this book is great. I am among those who love this. I think that when we're talking about readers, they probably wouldn't think necessarily how interesting this book is when you really crack it open, but you feel free to disagree with me.

Caroline, what do you think?

Caroline: I think by the end of this book once you've read the final, what, two or three chapters in which Miss Marple suddenly becomes a woman of action and takes charge and reveals the solution to the mystery. And then even at the very end, that little cherry on top that Christie puts, which the Vicar thinks, oh, you know, Miss Marple can't possibly have realised that my wife is pregnant. And Miss Marple just subtly lets everyone know. Oh, I know, I know. You have no secrets from me.

I think once you've read that, I personally would like to think I would go. Well, I want a book where she's in it all the time. If this is the potential of the last three chapters of this one, then yes, I want more of her and I want more specifically focused on her, which is luckily what Christie gave us in The Body in the Library and those that followed.

I think you could be say two thirds of the way through the book though, and go, well, I think this is a one-off character that I can afford to let stay only in this book that she only starts to shine for me right near the end. Christie doesn't actually say this in her assessment, perhaps that's one of the other things that she would do differently with hindsight, with more experience. The fact that it is a little bit uneven when it comes to Miss Marple's involvement, and maybe that was a very deliberate literary choice. Maybe she was trying to write a kind of off the page armchair detective. I don't know that it's totally successful, but it becomes so at the very end.

Leandra: And the question too is I suppose is the type of reader who is picking up this novel at the time of publication, what is their experience with Miss Marple previously? Because while this is the first novel length book, Christie was obviously publishing short stories before that, and so I suppose it would be interesting to wonder, okay, is this a fan of the short stories so they already know they should be keeping an eye on Miss Marple and they know what her capabilities are, or are you entering this book with no knowledge of this character and you're still trying to figure her out and wonder how great is she? And wondering why she is in the background.

But I also think that this is. Just proof that you should reread books and reread this book. So I am so happy that we ended up rereading this because I ended up being able to look at it from a completely different perspective.

And while the crime at hand is the A plot and is something that obviously intrigues us and will keep us entertained, I really did enjoy the huge cast of characters. I know that that is a criticism that we also mentioned, and that Agatha Christie wasn't a huge fan of it, but there's just so much to enjoy about this book, and I think that is something that if anyone comes away from this episode, consider how long ago did you read this book? And is it time for a reread? Because I think that the answer will be yes, it is.

Caroline: Absolutely. I think that's ultimately where I landed on it, that I had a lot of criticisms as I was reading it, and yet I finished it and thought, wow, that was great. And so I suppose what this rereading did for me was, I don't know if I needed reminding, but it reminded me quite how good Christie was or is because even when I feel like there was some quite clear missteps in the way this book is handled. It's still one of the best things I've read so far this year, and I've read it before. So yes, absolutely. People should reread this if it's been a while. Read it for the first time if you haven't come across it because it is such a rich text.

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This episode of Shedunnit was produced and hosted by me, Caroline Crampton. My guest was Leandra Griffith, who makes videos about books at her Youtube channel, Leandra the TBR Zero.

You can find links to all the books and sources we referenced in the episode description and at shedunnitshow.com/rediscoveringmissmarple. I publish transcripts of every episode including this one; find them all at shedunnitshow.com/transcripts.

If you'd like to hear the full hour long conversation about The Murder at the Vicarage, or indeed any of the other episodes Leandra have made together, join the Shedunnit Book Club now at shedunnitbookclub.com/join.

Shedunnit is edited by Euan McAleece and production assistance came from Leandra Griffith.

Thanks for listening.