Work Text:
The Marple Mystery
While perusing the excellent Wold-Newton Crossover Chronology, I was struck by the following entries:
1922
THE ADVENTURE OF HILLERMAN HALL, OR, HOW A HERMIT WAS DISTURBED IN HIS RETIREMENT
Sherlock Holmes assists a young and very innocent Miss Jane Marple extricate herself from a spot of trouble.
Short story by Julian Symons, The Great Detectives, Abrams Books, 1981; also in The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Richard Lancelyn Green, editor, Penguin Books, 1985.
[…]
1930 - Miss Marple's first case, Murder at the Vicarage, by Agatha Christie.
When we think of Miss Marple, we think of an elderly lady, filled with wisdom born of decades observing human nature. Could her first case really have been a mere eight years after she was “young and very innocent”?
It doesn’t appear so. In Murder at the Vicarage, the Reverend Leonard Clement, narrating, describes her as “a white-haired old lady with a gentle, appealing manner”. Her grasp of human nature is apparent, but seemingly much sharper than readers might be used to; the Reverend’s wife, Grisella, calls her “the worst cat in the village. And she always knows every single thing that happens — and draws the worst inferences from it.” While the Rev. Clement disagrees with this view, the fact remains: Miss Marple was a shrewd old lady in 1930.
It's worse than that; this might have been the first case she was actively involved in, but Christie had previously chronicled her involvement in the “Tuesday Night Club”, a group of friends, including her nephew Raymond West, who challenged each other to solve mysteries. (Miss Marple, of course, solved every one.) These cases were published The Royal Magazine from 1927, so must have occurred before that, and the description of Miss Marple here makes her, if anything, sound even older than in The Murder in the Vicarage. And yet, The Adventure of Hillerman Hall supposedly occurred just five years earlier.
Can we push Miss Marple’s encounter with Holmes back? Probably not by much. Not only is Holmes retired, but Miss Marple specifically refers to His Last Bow, saying it was “published a few years ago, in 1917.” The details of the story make it clear it takes place after World War One.
In The Great Detectives, the story is followed by a biographical portrait of Miss Marple written by the Reverend Clement, but this fails to clarify much as he neglects to include any dates. While it contains some interesting information, the most notable aspect is that he was still alive to provide it, fifty years after he described himself as a older man with a wife twenty years his junior.
Which brings me to the other oddity about Miss Marple’s chronology; just how long it lasts. Discounting Sleeping Murder, which was published following Christie’s death but is set in the 1930s, her last case was published in 1971, and the later books are clearly set in a contemporary world of new housing estates[1], television and pop music[2]. Of course, immortality serums abound in the Wold-Newton Universe, but in St Mary Mead?
Exactly how old is she said to be in the books? Good question. In 4:50 From Paddington (1957), Miss Marple claims to be 89, but in At Bertram’s Hotel (1965), she remembers visiting the hotel sixty years earlier at the age of fourteen. Assuming both books have a contemporary setting[3], this would give her birthdate as either 1868 or 1891 – quite a difference!
Unless, of course, they’re not the same Miss Marple. We know Miss Marple had two sisters who gave her one niece (Mabel Dedman) and nephew (Raymond West); is it too much to suggest that she also had a brother, who had a daughter named Jane? Let’s say that Jane Marple the first appears in the books from The Thirteen Problems to 4:50 From Paddington (including Sleeping Murder) and Jane Marple the second appears from The Mirror Crack'd From Side to Side to Nemesis.
Even a Miss Marple who was born in 1891 and was 14 in 1905 would be 31 in 1922. But let us suppose that Dame Agatha slipped up slightly there, and meant to say that trip to London was only fifty years earlier, 1915. That makes her 21 at the time she asked Holmes to help find her fiancé, with the resultant shattering of her innocence.
The Jane Marple who appears in this story really is very naïve and innocent. So, for that matter, are her parents and brother. While she tells Holmes at the end that she has learned something of true wickedness, could someone with this background really use a single event to become the keen student of human nature we see in the books?
Yes, if she had suitable support. The younger Jane’s parents were as bewildered by the situation as she was, but her Aunt Jane was there to provide the practical advice and assistance she needed. The two stayed in touch, and the younger Jane learned much about the intricacies of village life and how human nature is much the same everywhere.
Of course, this sort of thing is a two-way street. As noted earlier, in 1930 the elder Miss Marple had something of a reputation in St Mary Mead as a spiteful gossip, which seemed exaggerated but not unearned. In fact, it had been much truer in the previous decade, and became less so the more time she spent with her niece. Previously, she had probably given up on her unworldly brother and his family, but as she saw the younger Jane’s belief that there was still goodness in the world remain strong, even as she learned about its darkness, her own cynicism softened.
The elder Miss Marple passed away in her nineties, at some point in the early sixties, and left Danemeade, her home in St Mary Mead, to her niece, at this point in her own sixties. Many of the villagers, especially the younger ones, would be vaguely aware from the conversation of their elders that there had “always” been a Miss Marple living there.[4]
There are probably cases the two investigated together that we know nothing of. Certainly, by the time of The Mirror Crack’d, Inspector Craddock was familiar enough with the second Miss Marple to call her “Aunt Jane” – something he never dared do with the Miss Marple of the earlier books.
Of course there are still issues here. In the later books Miss Marple is still described as the aunt of the novelist Raymond West, whereas this Miss Marple would actually be his cousin. Since this Raymond West appears to be the much same age as he was in The Thirteen Problems, I suggest that Christie gave the name to a similar nephew of Miss Marple the younger, perhaps the son of her brother Bertie, in order to maintain continuity[5].
As for the apparently long lived Reverend Clement, 4:50 From Paddington reveals that Leonard and Griselda had a son, also named Leonard. Doubtless he followed his father into the church and when contacted by Symonds decided that, as he was maintaining the pretence there was only one Miss Marple, he might as well also maintain there was only one Rev Leonard Clement. He perhaps found it cathartic to portray his father as absolutely mortified upon revisiting the unflattering way his mother was described in the narration of Murder at the Vicarage.
Incidentally, while tracing the Marple family, I found evidence that an earlier Jane Marple, the great-aunt of the elder Jane described in this article, did not remain Miss Marple, but married an Irishman named MacGill. They emigrated to America, where their descendants would include the abolitionist Sarah McCullough and the novelist J. B. Fletcher. One branch returned to the UK, and is notable for the music hall star Emma MacGill.[6]
[1] “The Development” in The Mirror Crack’d From Side to Side.
[2] Both are mentioned in At Bertram’s Hotel.
[3] As noted above, there are references in At Bertram’s Hotel which firmly place it in the sixties. It is possible that these references were added by Christie to make it feel more contemporary, and the events actually occurred many years earlier. (See the BBC adaptation, evidently interpreted by someone who also found Miss Marple’s apparent longevity unlikely, for one example of what this might look like.) The most telling point against this, ironically, is how old-fashioned the hotel itself is. If Dame Agatha was adding 1960s elements to a story that actually took place in the 1930s, why not modernise the hotel? Instead, we are repeatedly told how it appears unchanged since Miss Marple’s first visit, decades earlier.
[4] Other explanations have been offered for this, but I hesitate to suggest them here.
[5] It’s also possible that this could have been one of Raymond West’s sons, Lionel or David. (As a side note, I have been unable to find any reliable evidence regarding the existence of a daughter named Mabel or Maybelle.) They would have been her second-cousins, of course, but it’s clear that the second Miss Marple was “Aunt Jane” to many people, regardless of actual relations or lack thereof.
It is notable that the Miss Marple portrayed in The Adventure of Hillerman Hall states she has “no sister but one brother.” In which case, she is unlikely to have a nephew with the surname West. This is, incidentally, completely contradicted by the subsequent biographical sketch, which is, of course, mostly talking about the first Miss Marple.
[6] For more information about Mrs Fletcher, see Murder Magnetism: Four Case Studies by Matthew Ilseman. Her relationship to the Marples, and the fact both Sarah McCullough and Emma MacGill found themselves investigating murders (see the TV movie Murder, She Wrote: The Last Free Man and the Murder, She Wrote episode “It Runs in the Family”) suggests that the “murder magnetism” proposed by Ilseman may be genetic in some way. (It is also interesting to note that Mrs Fletcher is also “Aunt Jess” to a great number of people, only some of whom are her actual niblings.)