Miss Marple (My Rating: 5+)
Nemesis Behind Blue Eyes
A milkman drives a horse drawn cart full of quart milk bottles through a small country village. A maid enters a drawing room in an English country home to open the curtains and let in the sun. She turns and screams as she spies a body in the library. Thus opens The Body in the Library, the first of the BBC productions of the 12 Miss Marple novels starring Joan Hickson.
Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple takes the detective genre in a new direction. The elderly spinster lives in the little rural village of St. Mary Mead and does her “amateur” sleuthing without any official standing, often when no one asks her to do so and sometimes when a friend asks for her help (as does Dolly in The Body in the Library). The police may accept her help – or even seek it – but more often treat her an an elderly “nosey parker.”
Several actors have played Miss Marple, who appears variously in the books and film versions as between 60 and 90 years old. My favorite one is the BBC series, starring Hickson, that are based on the same 12 full novels. (These TV versions depart from the order the novels were written. For example, the excellent Nemesis comes before the episode in which Miss Marple gains this appellation.) I also like the ITV versions with Geraldine McEwan and Julia McKenzie which I will get to another time. But Hickson is the best, she portrays Miss Marple with the appropriate piercing blue eyes and cunning cynicism about people and life in English villages. In one episode she notes: “Pick up a stone in any English village and anything might crawl out.” In another she admits her strong belief in “evil, everlasting life and goodness.” The Hickson films were done from 1984 to 1992 when she was in her 80s. She is simply marvelous in the role.
Miss Marple usually conducts her investigation parallel to that of the detective inspector, who will often be seen doing all of the typical and preliminary witness interviews. (In one episode, the assisting detective sergeant is played by Kevin Whately, who appears later as DS and then Inspector Lewis in the Morse series and spinoff.) She may or may not have all of the information thus gained but goes her own way combining her own grey cells – though she never uses Poirot’s term – and the many examples of rural events she has seen in her long life. The stories usually end with a variation of the assembly of witnesses and big reveal. Miss Marple arranges with the police – now aware that she knows what happened and who did it – for a little trap to catch the murderer trying to do it again. Kinda of satisfying to see the guilty face when the flashlights shine.
One of the real pleasures of this series – as also with Poirot – are the efforts that were taken to establish the right time period. Now I have no real idea of what the post-WWII English countryside looked like but BBC ought to have known. The details are fun to watch, especially the clothes, shops, vehicles, language and customs. The series ends with Miss Marple having tea in a lovely English garden.
I’ve read only one of the Marple books, The Thirteen Problems (from 1927), which contained her first appearance. A series of connected short stories, you can find it here: https://ia802808.us.archive.org/22/items/ac260220/The%20Thirteen%20Problems%20%28Marple%20stories%29.pdf
You can stream the A Pocket Full of Rye episode here: https://archive.org/details/MarpleRyeMirrors/Miss+Marple+04a+A+Pocketful+of+Rye.mkv
I’ll be back in September with more murder mysteries.