Agatha Christie and William Shakespeare are said to be the most popular authors world-wide. To be neck-and-neck with the Bard of Avon in terms of global sales is no small achievement. But does that mean that in purely literary terms Agatha Christie is up there with Homer, Virgil, Dante, Milton, Goethe, Flaubert, Joyce etc.? Well, probably not . . .
Be that as it may, Dr Aldridge’s remit in his entertaining and informative talk was much narrower than this: he’d come to tell us about Hercule Poirot’s only rival in the Christie detective stakes, Miss Marple.
He began by reminding us that Agatha Christie was a child of the Victorian age; but that she died in the 1970s. Her books reflect that chronological range; and not the least interesting aspect of the 12 novels and 20 short stories featuring Miss Marple is the way in which that they reflect the huge social changes her creator witnessed during her lifetime.
For instance it may be worth noting that her 1957 novel 4.50 from Paddington predicted (though with great regret) the abolition of capital punishment; and in The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side (1962), while the title harks back to Tennyson (who could be more Victorian than that?), the novel itself contains references to a new supermarket in Miss Marple’s village and its new housing development, both very up-to-date phenomena in the 1960s.
The first novel to feature Marple is The Murder at the Vicarage (published in 1930, though a short story featuring the same elderly sleuth, The Tuesday Night Club, had appeared three years earlier); the last to be seen through the press by its author was Nemesis (1971) — though another novel, Sleeping Murder, was published posthumously in 1976.
The jury’s out on the extent to which this memorable character was based a) on Christie’s grandmother (as Christie herself once claimed) or b) (at least in her later stories) on Christie herself.
But, of course, (and quite rightly, since such characters are ageless) Miss Marple’s age doesn’t change much through the decades. She seems to be more or less in her seventies in every story.
In 1927 Christie was still only in her thirties. Other works of fiction from her prolific pen include young female adventurers like ‘Tuppence’ and Anne Beddingfield: both more like Christie at this time than the considerably older Miss Marple.
Nevertheless in works such as They Do It with Mirrors (1952), A Caribbean Mystery (1964), and At Bertram’s Hotel(1965), Miss Marple’s memories do tend to coincide with her creator’s.
Some considerable time was devoted to those actors who had, on the one hand, at various times been lined up to play Miss Marple, either on the small or large screen, namely Peggy Wood, Lilian Gish, Celia Johnson, Gemma Jones, Maggie Smith and Jennifer Garner; and, on the other hand, those who actually landed the role, such as Angela Lansbury, Helen Hayes and Joan Hickson.
We’re grateful to Dr Aldridge for so generously giving up his valuable time in order to supply us with his considerable erudition in this field.
Our thanks to Kevin Maynard for this report.