Classic Crime: Murder, she laughed

Felled by the dreaded lurgy in early January I was sidelined from my usual reading routine. It’s hard to concentrate when little spikes of fever send your mind swimming into the stratosphere. The symptoms weren’t that bad but the fatigue was real and concentration was not at peak performance. 

An Agatha Christie re-read was in order. I read seven of the twelve Miss Marples and it was just the ticket. Reliably readable and not taxing. 

I had forgotten – or perhaps I hadn’t noticed as a teenager –  just how funny they are.

Take, for example, this comic set piece.

A man is dying, contorted in agony after drinking his morning tea that has been delivered by his personal secretary, Miss Grosvenor.  But not to worry, he is a thoroughly unpleasant man with a thoroughly unpleasant family and anyway is a foreigner from mittel Europe who anglicized his name to Fortescue. 

“Tea – what the hell – you put in the tea – get help – quick get a doctor.”

Miss Grosvenor fled from the room. She was no longer the supercilious blonde secretary — she was a thoroughly frightened woman who had lost her head.

“Mr. Fortescue’s having a fit – he’s dying – we must get a doctor – he looks awful – I’m sure he’s dying.”

Reactions were immediate and varied a good deal.

Miss. Bell, the youngest typist, said, “If it’s epilepsy we ought to put a cork in his mouth. Who’s got a cork?”

Nobody had a cork.

Miss. Somers said, “At his age it’s probably apoplexy.”

Miss. Griffith said, “We must get a doctor at once.”

But she was hampered in her usual efficiency because in all her sixteen years of service it had never been necessary to call a doctor to the city office. There was her own doctor but that was at Streatham Hill. Where was there a doctor near here?

Nobody knew. Miss Bell seized a telephone directory and began looking up Doctors under D. But it was not a classified directory and doctors were not  automatically listed like taxi ranks. Someone suggested a hospital — but which hospital? ‘It has to be the right hospital,’ Miss Somers insisted, ‘or else they won’t come. Because of the National Health, I mean. It’s got to be in the area.’

Someone suggested 999 but Miss. Griffith was shocked at that and said it would mean the police and that would never do. For citizens of a country which enjoyed the benefits of Medical Service for all, a group of quite reasonably intelligent women showed incredible ignorance of correct procedure. Miss. Bell started looking up Ambulances under A. Miss. Griffith said, “There’s his own doctor – he must have a doctor.” Someone rushed for the private address book. Miss. Griffith instructed the office boy to go out and find a doctor – somehow, anywhere. In the private address book. Miss. Griffith found Sir Edwin Sandeman with an address in Harley Street. Miss. Grosvenor, collapsed in a chair, wailed in a voice whose accent was noticeably less Mayfair than usual, “I made the tea just as usual – reely I did – there couldn’t have been anything wrong in it.”

“Wrong in it?” Miss. Griffith paused, her hand on the dial of the telephone. “Why do you say that?”

“He said it – Mr. Fortescue – he said it was the tea,”

Miss. Griffith’s hand hovered irresolutely between Welbeck* and 999. Miss. Bell, young and hopeful, said: “We ought to give him some mustard and water – Now. Isn’t there any mustard in the office?”

There was no mustard in the office.

Some short while later Dr. Isaacs of Bethnal Green, and Sir Edwin Sandeman met in the elevator just as two different ambulances drew up in front of the building. The telephone and the office boy had done their work. – A Pocketful of Rye (1953)

Social Change

The post-war world was changing and Agatha Christie takes note. More foreigners about for one thing.

If Letty Blacklock hasn’t seen her for thirty years, she’d probably not recognize her now. One elderly woman is very like another. You remember Mrs Wotherspoon drew her own and Mrs Bartlett’s Old Age Pension although Mrs Bartlett had been dead for years. Anyway, Miss Blacklock’s short- sighted. Haven’t you noticed how she peers at people? And then there’s the father. Apparently he was a real bad lot.’

“Yes, but he’s a foreigner.”

‘By birth. But there’s no reason to believe he speaks broken English and gesticulates with his hands. I dare say he could play the part of—of an Anglo-Indian Colonel as well as anybody else.’ – A Murder is Announced (!950)

It’s harder than ever to find servants in post-war Britain and sometimes you do have to make do with hysterical, paranoid refugees from mittel Europe and it’s so tiresome to put up with their tantrums and lies even though they provide comic relief when the bodies are piling up. 

‘These foreigners certainly understand confectionery, said Miss Hinchcliffe. ‘What they can’t make is a plain boiled pudding.’

Everybody was respectfully silent, though it seemed to be hovering on Patrick’s lips to ask if anyone really wanted a plain boiled pudding. – A Murder is Announced

Of course, Hinch (of Hinch and Murgatroyd) is a lesbian who knows how to feed pigs and how to bargain on the black market with local farmers. She cannot, therefore, be expected to have any sense of humor. 

Padding gingerly through the long wet grass, Miss Amy Murgatroyd approached her friend. The latter, attired in corduroy slacks and battledress tunic, was conscientiously stirring in handfuls of balancer meal to a repellently steaming basin full of cooked potato peelings and cabbage stumps.

Medicine is changing too and with the National Health Service is accessible to everyone. An old-fashioned doctor is said to be stuck in his ways, obstinately refusing new ideas and methods.

Miss Marple weighs in:

‘I don’t really know that I blame him there, said Miss Marple. ‘I always feel that the young doctors are only too anxious to experiment. After they’ve whipped out all our teeth, and administered quantities of very peculiar glands, and removed bits of our insides, they then confess that nothing can be done for us. I really prefer the old-fashioned remedy of big black bottles of medicine. After all, one can always pour those down the sink.’ – A Murder is Announced

Christie’s male characters don’t think much of women and nor do the police:

“One of those bossy women?’ suggested Craddock.

“Very possibly,’ said the assistant commissioner. ‘Still in my experience, bossy women seldom get themselves murdered. I can’t think why not. When you come to think of it, it’s rather a pity.” – The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side (1962)

Many of Christie’s books provide a glimpse into a different world but also one of change. It’s not just the difficulty of finding servants but also the food, the drink, social norms and expectations, attitudes, language, houses, habitats, furniture, new housing estates, and who lives where.  The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side reads in part like a treatise on social change. 

In The Body in the Libary (1942) the dance band at the seaside hotel (Bournemouth?) plays into the small hours. It’s era of parlormaids and cooks  In Mirrors, twenty years later St. Mary Mead now has a new housing estate and there’s a supermarket in the high street. It’s world of packets and cereal instead of a proper breakfast.

Miss Marple has a lady’s companion and employs Cherry Baker from the housing estate to help with the housework. 

Owing to the insidious snares of Hire Purchase, they were always in need of ready money, though their husbands all earned good wages; and so they came and did housework or cooking. Cherry was a quick and efficient cook, she was an intelligent girl, took telephone calls correctly and was quick to spot inaccuracies in the tradesmen’s books. She was not much given to turning mattresses, and as far as washing up went Miss Marple always now passed the pantry door with her head turned away so as not to observe Cherry’s method which was that of thrusting everything into the sink together and letting loose a snowstorm of detergent on it. Miss Marple had quietly removed her old Worcester teaset from daily circulation and put it in the corner cabinet whence it only emerged on special occasions. Instead she had purchased a modern service with a pattern of pale grey on white and no gilt on it whatsoever to be washed away in the sink.

Detective-Inspector Frank Cornish still feels free to use the word “pansy” and Cherry indulges in some classic stereotyping , warning her friend Gladys of the dangers of italian men:

‘I — and you’d better be careful, my girl. You know what these wops are like! Affiliation orders all over the place. Hot-blooded and passionate, that’s what these Italians are.’

Gladys sighed ecstatically.

The social commentary in Mirror Cracked is heavy handed and extensive. It is, however, an  interesting meditation on a rapidly changing country and countryside. It was more interesting that the actual plot which seems almost an afterthought and secondary to the main theme of social change. That’s what gives period pieces their value. 

Here are the twelve Miss Marple novels in chronological order. I read numbers 2 through 8.  That means – should I get afflicted again (not something i would wish on anyone, relatively mild though it was) – I have five more to go.   

1. The Murder at the Vicarage (1930)
2. The Body in the Library (1942)
3. The Moving Finger (1943)
4. A Murder Is Announced (1950)
5. They Do It with Mirrors (1952) – also published as Murder With Mirrors
6. A Pocket Full of Rye (1953)
7. 4.50 from Paddington (1957) – also published as What Mrs. McGillicuddy Saw!
8. The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side (1962)
9. A Caribbean Mystery (1964)
10. At Bertram’s Hotel (1965l)
11. Nemesis (1971)
12. Sleeping Murder (1976)

*Can anyone explain that ‘Welbeck” reference?