Village Murder Transcript

Caroline: The English village is at the heart of Agatha Christie's work, and at the heart of its success. Her books are not always set in villages, of course, but is hard to imagine her achieving the same level of popularity if she had not set many of her stories in her beautiful villages. Everyone knows St Mary Mead, and in our minds we are half convinced that we have been there. And it is not just St Mary Mead that Christie gives us, nor are the villages confined to the Marple stories. She created an experience, a genre – ‘Village Murder’. That was even an alternative title for her story ‘Tape-Measure Murder’. Two words, ‘Village Murder’, with no definite or indefinite article. It could be a title for so many stories and sounds like the name for a type of murder, a category, a form of activity like ‘village cricket’.

So why are her village murders so effective? Let's find out.

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Agatha Christie used the word ‘village-y’. You know what she means - the church bells, a cricket match, tea in the garden, a pint at the ancient inn, the gravel drive of the big house, gossip outside the village shop, sit-up-and-beg bicycles leant against an oak on the green. Villagey stories. The 1980s BBC Miss Marple captured this perfectly with its memorable title sequence – in those, it was the village that was the star, the village was at the heart of the story, and that opening sequence was not about Miss Marple directly, but the village in which she lived.

There are five main reasons why the village is such an effective scenario for Christie's style of murder mystery.

First, there is a striking and memorable contrast between the beautiful, sleepy, kindly setting and the brutal murder. To refer back to those BBC opening credits, it’s the contrast between the beautiful cricket match, which we see first, and the dead body that we then see on the boundary of the cricket field. In The Murder at the Vicarage, Miss Cram says that a murder is so shocking because St Mary Mead is a ‘quiet, one-horse village’ with ‘not so much as a picture-house’. It is assumed that quietness and prettiness means kindness and safety. You can believe – as many of us do – that villages are far superior to cities, that bad people live in towns and cities and good people live in villages; that’s why murder in a village is so shocking; murder in a city is not shocking because you expect them to be the home of criminality, cruelty and brutality. ‘God made the country, and man made the town’ according to poet William Cowper.

What wonder then, that health and virtue, gifts 
That can alone make sweet the bitter draught 
That life holds out to all, should most abound 
And least be threaten’d in the fields and groves?

Or maybe God made the village and the devil made the city. The village is a place of health and virtue and the church is at its heart physically and in spirit – it’s not so much that religion is at its heart but the culture and polite decency of the church. Of course, Christie shows that it is not so simple as that, and, with time, the effect wears off a little – after reading several novels, or watching television dramas, we are no longer so surprised; but on some level it always seems a strange and intriguing combination, murder and the thatched cottages, crime and the village church, screams among the birdsong, blood the colour of the roses by the door. It is still unexpected – in a peaceful, quiet village far away from city life we would not expect to see such a crime.

In addition to the contrast between the village and the murder, Christie also gives us other contrasts: the contrast between the movie world and village life in The Mirror Crack’d, the contrast between the content of the poison pen letters and the inhabitants of the village (or technically a small town) in The Moving Finger, and in The Body in the Library we are told how a victim’s appearance itself is out of place: the ‘cheap, flamboyant figure’ on the hearthrug was ‘most incongruous’ in the ‘solid old-fashioned comfort’ of the library.

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Secondly, the village setting makes us, the reader, a tourist enjoying a beautiful location, one that may well be more beautiful than our own place of residence. This setting offers some pleasure to the reader and we can use our imaginations in order to create the village of the story. We would rather read about a beautiful village than about some gloomy city suburb. This is the National Trust quality if you like – we go visiting a lovely place as an escape from our own lives. Most people don't live in St Mary Mead any more than they live in a country house or a castle. It was escape and nostalgia even in the 1920s. In A Murder is Announced, Chipping Cleghorn is described as picturesque, ‘Self-consciously a beauty spot’ – one that ‘Caters for the motoring tourist’. In A Pocketful of Rye, Miss Marple calls St Mary Mead ‘quite a pretty village’. In The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side it is called ‘delightful’. Wychwood in Murder is Easy has ‘small Georgian houses, prim and aristocratic’ and ‘picturesque cottages with flower gardens’. The names alone are beautiful: Locke Hamlet, St Mary Mead, Milton St John, Jocelyn St Mary, Polperran, Merryfield. And in the Poirot stories, too, villages include Little Hembury, Charman’s Green, Malton-under-Wode, Hamborough St John, Hamborough St Mary, Styles St Mary, Marsdon Leigh, Lytchett St Mary, Little Wimplington. Think of the poet and countryside writer Edward Thomas celebrating the names of the south of England in 1909, and how he would have enjoyed the villages of Christie country. He wrote:

If only those poems which are place-names could be translated at last, the pretty, the odd, the romantic, the racy names of copse and field and lane and house. What a flavour there is about the Bassetts, the Boughtons, the Worthys, the Tarrants, Winterbournes, Deverills, Manningfords, the Suttons: what goodly names of the South Country—Woodmansterne, Hollingbourne, Horsmonden, Wolstanbury, Brockenhurst, Caburn, Lydiard Tregoze, Lydiard Miliicent, Clevancy, Amesbury, Amberley (I once tried to make a beautiful name and in the end it was Amberley, in which Time had forestalled me); what sweet names Penshurst, Frensham, Firle, Nutley, Appleshaw, Hambledon, Cranbrook, Fordingbridge, Melksham, Lambourn, Draycot, Buscot, Kelmscot, Yatton, Yalding, Downe, Cowden, Iping, Cowfold, Ashe, Liss. . . .

Christie knew that these places appeal to us – not just for their names but for everything they evoke and represent. The English have always had affection for rural villages even when they had no desire to live in them. And to overseas audiences they are quintessentially English. People love the books because they represent their idea or indeed ideal of England. In The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side, the famous American actor Marina Gregg loves the Englishness of St Mary Mead: ‘English quiet’, English gardens, English afternoon tea, ‘a lovely old-fashioned rural English scene’.

Other detective novelists copied Christie, but some seem to have consciously tried to give readers somethings else – the ugly village if you like. In The Nine Tailors by Dorothy L. Sayers, Fenchurch St Paul is not that kind of picturesque Miss Marple village even though it does have a remarkable church. The church is situated away from the village. The village is set in a flat, bleak land of dykes and ditches and desolation, surrounded by a landscape of viaducts and bridges, sluices and mud. And ‘wheat, potatoes, beet, mustard, and wheat again, grassland, potatoes, lucerne, wheat, beet and mustard’. To Lord Peter Wimsey ‘the village presented nothing of interest’. When the floods come, and the church on higher ground survives, the village is under water as if the only thing worth preserving had been preserved, like Noah’s Ark.

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Third, despite the appeal to the dreamer in us, the villages in Christie are realistic villages in their way. Other novelists chose to write about cities and would be considered more realistic perhaps, but just because most people didn’t live in villages that doesn’t mean that they are not realistic. Christie says in her autobiography that St Mary Mead ‘is as real to me as it could be’ and that there are several places like it. We don’t live in such villages but they are nonetheless real. And Christie is offering some realism, she’s recording a period of change that people were and are interested in. There has been a lot said about whether her work is realistic, but her villages show an awareness of how society and the countryside in particular was changing. The murders themselves are symbolic of the arrival of modernity, like the arrival of the flamboyant modern woman on the hearthrug in The Body in the Library. Modernity is coming to the villages – in that same novel, Basil Blake from the film industry lives in a ‘ghastly’ ‘hideous’ modern building at St Mary Mead where he holds parties. Robert Barnard tried to sum up the case against Christie as follows: ‘Most of these books take place in an eternal fairyland disguised as an English village.’ But it is not an eternal fairyland – it is twentieth-century England. Before the first world war, the politician and writer Charles Masterman in his famous study The Condition of England in 1909 complained about the ‘ruined villages and dwindling population of the countryside’ – ‘Once there was life in rural England. That life is vanishing like a dream.’

the labourer in the fields at noontide or evening, the old English service in the old English village church, now stand but as the historical survival of a once great and splendid past.

‘We can discern the passing of a race of men.’ That might be a bit melodramatic but villages did change, and Christie records the changes. She also records how, despite Masterman’s fears, villages did survive by changing. People go, and new people arrive, along with new buildings. Domestic servants become cleaning ladies. The shops are modernized. There is a supermarket and a new housing estate in The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side. Miss Marple visits the estate with its closes and its depraved teenagers and its women who wear trousers. She sees Carrisbrook Close, Aubrey Close, Walsingham Close, Darlington Close. In A Murder is Announced it is noted that the cottages that used to be for farm workers are now home to retired couples and spinsters. But villages have indeed moved away from farming and most village residents have no connection to the land. A Murder is Announced also notes how every village had many newcomers now, some of them from abroad, none of them with the comforting ties to pre-existing social circles – the old idea of families of all stations staying put for many generations has passed.

We could look at motor cars too – they are common enough in the stories. In a Poirot story he is only in a particular village because his car broke down. The same device was used by Dorothy L Sayers in The Nine Tailors. Charles Masterman in The Condition of England complained about the effects of cars and foresaw what would happen – cars were already destroying ‘the amenities of the rural life of England’. He saw ‘an England vulgarised by the clamour and vigour of the newer wealthy, racing each other down on motor cars from the noise of the town, into the heart of a great silence : the silence that broods over a doomed and passing race.’ Cars changed villages completely, it's true. Masterman worried about our increasing obsession with speed. Historian George Dangerfield in The Strange Death of Liberal England in 1935 also complained about ‘the loud invading automobile’ on Edwardian country roads – think of Toad in The Wind in the Willows. Cars connect the villages to London. For Basil Blake’s parties people come down from London. There was a great deal of worry at that time about the growth of London and its roads spreading out across the south of England like tentacles strangling the villages. Sin can travel down to the villages from London. But other people come by car too – the police indeed, and Mrs McGillicuddy comes by train then taxi in 4.50 from Paddington.

London incidentally exists as a real place and place-name but the villages have made-up names and made-up counties. One effect of that is to give the sense that the villages could be anywhere in southern England – they represent everywhere not just one particular place. Take St Mary Mead, which was mentioned in The Mystery of the Blue Train then appeared in another county in The Murder at the Vicarage. Miss Marple’s village is in Downshire – ‘we’ll get to the bottom of this here in Downshire’ - but by The Body in the Library we seem to be in Radfordshire because Colonel Melchett is chief constable of Radfordshire.

Edward Thomas wrote in The South Country that ‘Some day there will be a history of England written from the point of view of one parish, or town, or great house.’ Christie’s villages are not quite that but they do show the impact of change and of historical events, not least two world wars. Yes, it’s usually a very beautiful, chocolate-box village that we are given by Christie, but she also shows the village changing during the twentieth century, and is aware of a village’s past.

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Fourth, the village provides a unique society, perfectly made for detective fiction – different people, of varying degrees of wealth, age and education, who nonetheless have to interact with each other, are dependent on each other and cannot live apart. Jane Austen said that "Three or four families in a country village is the very thing to work on" but Christie uses a wider range. Poison pen letters in The Moving Finger can spread across the village and insult everyone. Christie enjoyed emphasising these connections, such as at the very start of A Murder is Announced when she begins by describing in detail the newspaper round of Johnnie Butt in Chipping Cleghorn. The different papers show the different types of people in the village, but they all get their newspaper from the same boy.

It is a confined space, remote enough for there to be some control over who arrives and leaves, and big enough for a good range of suspects, plots and accessories, but small enough for the author, detective and reader to stay on top of what is going on. That small size is emphasised by the map in The Murder at the Vicarage. St Mary Mead is referred to as small even in The Mirror Crack’d. Later for other novelists the Oxbridge college or boarding school will be similar – a few hundred people separated from the rest of society– but the village is much more varied, less hierarchical, more integrated and more separate.

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Fifth, in a Christie village there is always someone watching what is going on – it is a community of gossips, spies and busybodies. This means that there are always going to be clues and surely every crime can be solved if a Poirot or Marple is on hand. It is harder to write convincingly about towns and cities where no one knows their neighbours and many thousands of anonymous people come and go. But also we instinctively bond with the gossips and snoopers because they are lie the readers – keen observers, spotting details, forming opinions about the characters they encounter. Send a detective fiction reader to a village and they will immediately start spying on their neighbours.

‘The detective instinct of village life’ is a theme established in The Murder at the Vicarage where we are told that everyone knows your intimate affairs – everyone in effect is a detective. There is tremendous local excitement when Colonel Protheroe is murdered. Everyone has something to talk about. But Miss Marple, an unmarried woman with curiosity, an eagle eye, a talent for chitchat and a lot of leisure time, is the best detective of all. In a quite village with few distractions, studying human nature has become her pastime and you can see a good deal of human nature in a village. But there is also plenty of this spying and gossiping in villages in the Poirot stories too, such as Dumb Witness.

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There’s one final point to make about Christie’s villages. Christie has surely contributed to the modern-day love for English villages. When we visit a village perhaps the theme tune from the 1980s Marple strikes up in our head, or we imagine Poirot standing in a garden inspecting a marrow. Has even the word cottage been given a particular magical meaning by Agatha Christie? Look online and you will see that estate agents are not afraid to reference Agatha Christie when selling a cottage, and house buyers explain their ambitions by referencing Miss Marple. The fact that Christie’s villages are full of murder doesn’t seem to put buyers off. We want to have Miss Marple as a neighbour and we want to live in the title sequence of the BBC Miss Marple series. But there's no need to move, really: readers of detective novels can escape to the country and expect a murder any minute.

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This episode of Shedunnit was written by Guy Cuthbertson and narrated by me, Caroline Crampton. For information about the books referenced in this episode, visit shedunnitshow.com/villagemurder. I also publish transcripts of every episode including this one; find them all at shedunnitshow.com/transcripts.

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

Thanks for listening.