Just finished packing to head off to Deal to help set up the conference venue for tomorrow’s Deal Noir event. Looking forward to meeting those of you who are coming tomorrow and to hearing the views of the excellent range of panelists who are jetting in from all around the globe to talk about the latest developments in Crime Fiction.
See you there.
I spent a rainy Easter Saturday in and around Mells in a quiet corner of Somerset. In the churchyard I tracked down the grave of Monsignor Ronald Knox, best known to fans of crime fiction as a member of The Detection Club. He wrote several Golden Age detective novels and collaborated with Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers and others in three books written collectively by members of the club at the height of their popularity in the 1930s, Behind The Screen, The Floating Admiral and Six Against The Yard.
Perhaps surprisingly he is also familiar to fans of Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope as the author of Barchester Pilgrimage, a continuation of the Barchester Chronicles of that author taking the children and grandchildren of characters from the series on into the following decades.
He is perhaps best remembered in ecclesiastical circles for his translation of the Vulgate Bible from the original Latin.
I don’t know what they would have made of his 1926 BBC radio play Broadcasting From The Barricades, a hoax programme purporting to be live reporting of a revolution taking place in London, which caused minor panic across the UK. The broadcast preceded the General Strike by some four months and anticipated the impact such broadcasts might have which was exploited to the full by Orson Welles in his War of the Worlds radio broadcast of 1938.
I’m sure he would have appreciated the joke.
We are delighted to announce two more speakers at The Bodies From The Library Conference on 11 June 2016.
Our first new speaker is Susan Moody, author of Penny Black, voted Number 56 of The Top 100 Crime Novels of All Time by the Crime Writers’ Association. Susan will be talking about Georgette Heyer.
Our second new speaker is Jennifer Henderson, author of the new biography of Josephine Tey, which was listed by The Observer in the best biographies of 2015 and by The Independent in its list of the best crime books of 2015.
Watch this space for further announcements on speakers who will be attending the conference.
The examination question used to be phrased along the lines: “compare and contrast…”
Having looked at each of Christie’s two greatest detectives in isolation, it is time to identify similarities and differences between them – or at least the short stories in which they appear.
If we consider the victims then we see that Poirot’s cases tend to have a bias towards male victims – they make up two-thirds of the victims – whereas Miss Marple’s cases almost exactly reverse this with slightly more than two-thirds of the victims being female.
A possible explanation for this is that Poirot, as a consulting private detective, is called in to investigate cases that are in the public domain whereas Miss Marple is more usually involved as an interested bystander in more domestic crimes. Since we are concerned with the period before the Second World War, the different spheres in which men and women moved are a significant factor. Generally, women at this time had a more domestic role than now. Married women tended not to go out to work but to stay at home and take responsibility for the household. Men, on the other hand, tended to go out to work as the main breadwinner of the family. Thus there would be a disproportionate number of men in any public setting and a proportionately greater number of women involved in a domestic scenario. Christie is therefore simply reflecting these differences in the proportion of each sex which falls victim to crime.
If we turn to the age profiles of the victims we find that there is again a discernible difference between the Poirot and the Miss Marple cases. The chart below shows the age of the victims – bear in mind that there are some 50 Poirot cases and only 20 Miss Marple cases so interpretation of the chart must take this imbalance into consideration.
The ages of the victims in Miss Marple’s cases are decidedly skewed towards the younger end whereas there is a more even spread of victim’s ages in the Poirot cases with the most frequent age of the victims falling in their 40s.
This might again be attributable to the public nature of Poirot’s cases since the victims in this public arena would tend to require sufficient time to achieve whatever prominence in business or public life is required to precipitate their murder – or to enable them to acquire sufficient wealth to be worthwhile potential victims of some form of theft.
However, given the domestic nature of many of Miss Marple’s cases, and the tendency for inheritance to provide the motive for more of the crimes within the family (6 out of her 20 cases), it is perhaps surprising to find that the victims in the Miss Marple cases tend to be younger. It transpires that the inheritance motive tends to apply almost exclusively to the cases where the victim is at the older end of the range and that the young victims are more likely to be murdered for other reasons. Love (as in the removal of an inconvenient obstacle in the form of a current spouse, for example) is the second most common motive for murder in Miss Marple’s cases (4 out of the 20) and this is more naturally a greater concern to the younger age groups. So on deeper analysis we see a divide in Miss Marple’s cases between older victims killed for inheritance motives and younger victims killed for motives of (misplaced) love.
Just a final reminder that if you haven’t secured your place at the 2016 Bodies From The Library Conference at the Early Bird 2015 price then there are less than 48 hours remaining in which to do so.
We look forward to seeing both old friends and new faces at the conference and hope you will be able to join us.
To book your place just click on the link on this page.
As the Festive Season draws ever closer, we wanted to remind you that there is still time to book your tickets for The Bodies From The Library 2016 at the special early bird price of £30.06. We have held the price at the same level as the 2015 event (give or take 6p extra booking fee) which we hope you will agree is great value for money.
We are delighted to be able to announce the first speakers confirmed for the Bodies From The Library conference 2016. We are particularly pleased to welcome back several of the popular speakers from the first conference.
Confirmed returning speakers are:
David Brawn
Dr John Curran
Martin Edwards
Dolores Gordon-Smith
Jake Kerridge
B. A. Pike
L.C. Tyler
More speakers, including the female author of one of the Top 100 Crime Novels of All Time, according to the list compiled by the Crime Writers’ Association, will be announced shortly.
Continuing the analysis of Agatha Christie’s short stories to test whether the stereotypes hold true, I shall turn my attention to the Miss Marple stories. There are fewer of these than the Poirots; a mere twenty compared to more than fifty, but once again the analysis will go beyond the mere profiling of the murderer (though this is, of course, included) to examine the typical victim – if there is such a thing – and those crucial other factors: means and motive.
A crucial factor in the analysis is that out of these twenty stories, one is in fact a puzzle, which Miss Marple solves, in which there is no crime committed. Of the remainder fifteen are murders (there are no multiple murders) and four are other crimes: thefts or attempted swindles, including an attempt to frame someone for something they did not do. Since the thefts have multiple victims, these have been excluded from the analysis of the victims but, given the overwhelming majority of the crimes are murders, I have otherwise not distinguished between the murders and other crimes in the analysis.
Let us first consider the victim.
Here we find that the majority of the victims, more than two out of every three, are women.
When it comes to determining the age of the victim, Christie only explicitly states the age of the victim once or twice, although sometimes a broad age band is given – such as “over forty” – but where such definitive statements are is absent we are left looking for clues as to the victim’s age. One might infer, perhaps, that a couple are of a similar age unless a notable disparity is specifically mentioned. Or there are other clues, such as the fact that the victim has a child who is not yet adult, which implies perhaps that the person is in their thirties based on social customs of the inter-war period when the majority of these stories were written.
From these clues, the age range of the victims is perhaps younger than might be expected with more than one third being in their thirties and nearly a quarter in their forties. Barely a quarter of the victims appear to be over age fifty.
The stereotype would have it that Christie’s stories are set in a middle class milieu and so the victims might be expected to be middle class. For the purposes of the analysis, I have therefore tried to differentiate between the finely nuanced gradations of class in English society between the wars. The middle class could be broken down into upper-middle (usually richer, posher, living in the country rather than the town, often with private incomes rather than working for a living); middle-class (genteel and might still have a maid but not a “household” of servants, may be in one of the professions such as law or medicine) – Miss Marple herself falls within this category; lower-middle (working for a living but not in a manual type of job).
These categorisations are by no means hard and fast though there was probably less fluidity between them than there is now. Indeed, a working class boy (and it would almost certainly have been a boy in this period) who passed his eleven plus and managed to attend a grammar school and did well there so that he might become a solicitor’s clerk might by dint of these efforts find himself in the lower-middle class but could never hope to pass himself off as one of the truly middle-middle class. His voice and accent would betray him; and probably his taste and the choice of words for certain things – “tea” being a particular shibboleth. (A working class person, when referring to his “tea” ,would mean the main evening meal, eaten after returning home from work. A middle class person would mean the light meal – often comprising sandwiches and cakes – eaten in mid-afternoon.)
Even after making this gradation, however, the overwhelming majority of the victims fall into that middle class category that falls between the upper-middle and lower-middle classes.
We can therefore build up a profile of the typical victim in one of the Miss Marple short stories. She will be a middle class female in her 30s. Inevitably only two of the sixteen individual victims actually fit this profile perfectly but six others fit at least two of the criteria (so half the victims exactly fit or at least closely fit the “typical” profile).
Turning to the perpetrators, we find that there is a marginally greater likelihood that the perpetrator will be a woman, acting either alone, or with another person (who might herself be a woman). We see no example of two men acting in consort.
The age of the perpetrator tends to be older than that of the typical victim, with over two-thirds of the perpetrators being in their forties or fifties (again, much reliance has to be placed on interpretation of evidence of likely age rather than being able to rely on Christie absolutely stating their age). There are apparently no particularly young perpetrators.
There is, however, a wider class distribution of perpetrators than victims of crime. The myth that the working class in Christie’s stories are merely there to provide a little background colour and humour is exploded by the finding that even within an apparently middle-class dominated setting, they commit at least one-fifth of all the crimes.
This enables us to build a profile of the typical murderer (for the crime as we have seen is much more likely to be murder in a Miss Marple story than in a Poirot story). She will be female, middle class and in her forties. This profile is a precise fit for four of the cases which is a remarkably accurate criminal profile – correct between 20% and 25% of the time. If we allow for those cases where the profile is accurate in two out of three respects, then the perpetrator is a close fit in a further five cases. This makes the profile reasonably accurate in about half the cases.
If we look at the relationship between the perpetrator and the victim of the crime, we find that the most common relationship is spouse. In fact this is invariably the husband – which is perhaps unsurprising given the majority of victims are female, though of course a husband could not satisfy the “typical profile” of the female perpetrator. Other relatives add a further five cases, so over half the murders are committed within the family.
This domestic murder is perhaps to be expected in the Miss Marple stories. She is more likely to be involved in a purely domestic crime involving friends or neighbours than in other types of crime – though this rule might be stretched somewhat by the “story-telling” device which Christie uses for The Thirteen Problems/The Tuesday Night Club tales which are related by others including a senior police officer.
As might also be expected, given the preponderance of murders within the family, inheritance is the most common motive for the murder. However, given, as we have seen, that the typical perpetrator is older than the typical victim, this motive actually does not tend to feature in the cases where these profiles hold true. Inheritance is, therefore, likely to be a motive in cases where either the killer or victim does not fit the “typical” profile.
Frustrated love, as can be seen above, is the second most common motive, often with the killing of a person who is either a love rival or an obstacle to marriage with the “love interest” in the story.
It is often said that poison is a woman’s weapon. The lack of physical strength to carry out other types of murder is cited as the reason for this together with, in Christie’s case, her own background with training in a pharmacy during the First World War which gave her familiarity with poisons, how they worked and their effective doses so as to give her work a verisimilitude which others could only hope to emulate. It will come as no surprise, therefore, that poison is indeed the preferred method of dispatching the victim.
I should perhaps point out that one murder may be either a stabbing or a bludgeoning to death. This is never made clear but the solution depends on the perpetrator having got the blood of the victim on their clothing so it must be one or other of these two methods requiring the perpetrator to be close to the victim at the time they are done to death. It has been counted against both headings just to be on the safe side!
The other formula supposedly used by Christie is that of the country house murder. This seems to be supported by the evidence, with the majority of the crimes being committed in a country house setting or, failing that, in a rural village.
That is not to say that Miss Marple does not venture to the metropolis. One plot revolves around a plan she hatches to catch the criminals by a cunning use of “going up to town” shopping for linen to decoy them off the scent. And in another case, Miss Marple provides the solution for a murder done abroad without ever requiring a passport herself.
Nevertheless, that there should be no obvious urban setting for the Miss Marple stories is perhaps inevitable given that she is an elderly spinster living in a country village and mixing with people who live (and die) in similar locations. It would, in fact, be contrived of Christie to engineer many radically different settings for her Miss Marple short stories.
For the same reason, it is rare for Miss Marple to be involved other than after the fact. She then either correctly deduces who was the criminal or identifies the criminal enabling the authorities to catch them. In only three cases is she involved before the crime is attempted and in one of these she prevents it taking place, in another she enables the police to identify and apprehend the criminals. It is only in one case where she fails to prevent a murder and this she deeply laments though she observes that having put it off once she could not prevent the inevitable as the murderer could simply have waited until Miss Marple was no longer around before making a move. Would anyone take any notice of an old lady who says she knows a person has murder in their heart because she recognises the signs based on her experience of parallels in village life? Miss Marple thinks not, and I cannot disagree.
So, the analysis shows that Christie does conform to many of the stereotypes in her Miss Marple short stories with the middle class, country house settings for family or domestic crimes, that are often motivated by desire to inherit sooner rather than later after allowing time and nature to take its course. It is a measure of Christie’s abilities as a writer of detective fiction that she manages to weave so many fascinating and perplexing mysteries within the limited scope for variation she is constrained to accept with Miss Marple as her sleuth.
How did Agatha Christie, an otherwise unremarkable woman, with no formal education, and no family background in writing produce the biggest-selling books in history? How was this self-effacing woman able to set a standard in detective fiction that has never been surpassed, or indeed, equalled? Alone of her crime-writing contemporaries how was she able to turn a simple and formulaic entertainment into an international pastime for, seemingly, all time?
In both her own books and via my two books about her Notebooks, with their lists of her ‘Unused Ideas’, we can appreciate how her fund of ideas seems to have been inexhaustible; it was, in all likelihood, the envy of her fellow-writers. Throughout her life she was able to rattle off plot ideas and devices with enviable ease. And she could adopt and adapt an earlier idea in such a well-disguised fashion as to render it unrecognisable.
We do know where she got some of her characters and backgrounds. Poirot was given the nationality, Belgian, of WWI refugees arriving in 1916 Torquay and Miss Marple shared some characteristics with Christie’s grandmother. The Boyntons in Appointment with Death were inspired by fellow-passengers on a Nile cruise; Major Belcher, Archie’s boss with whom they travelled on a round-the-world trade mission in 1922, became Sir Eustace in The Man in the Brown Suit; a colleague from her dispensing days inspired a character in The Pale Horse, forty years later. And personal experience often provided a setting – the geography of Burgh Island, off the Devon coast, appears unchanged in Evil under the Sun; the swimming-pool of the actor Francis L. Sullivan (a West End Poirot) provided the murder scene in The Hollow; her own home and garden at Greenway is the setting for Dead Man’s Folly and Five Little Pigs. The Orient Express, an archaeological dig, a sea voyage, a Caribbean holiday – all these personally-experienced backgrounds were put to good (or should that be bad?) use over a half-century of writing. We even know the origins of some plots: the device underlying Lord Edgware Dies was stimulated by a performance by the American actress Ruth Draper; The Mysterious Mr. Quin was inspired by the Harlequin figures from her childhood home, The Mousetrap had its origins in a tragic true-life crime and Death Comes as the End was written at the instigation of Stephen Glanville, a colleague of her husband Max Mallowan. Her knowledge of poisons from her WWI dispensing experience provided her with many plot ideas, well-loved children’s nursery rhymes lent themselves to sinister interpretations and a love throughout her life of crosswords and bridge no doubt stimulated her ‘little grey cells’.
In Agatha Christie’s Secret Notebooks I speculated about her continuing appeal and offered possible reasons – readability, plotting, fairness and productivity. And I still believe that they are of paramount importance in explaining her worldwide and enduring popularity. But I would add another factor and this may be the most important of all – simplicity. Although at first glance an Agatha Christie murder mystery may seem complicated, her last-chapter explanation always shows the underlying answer to be straightforward. When one simple fact is grasped, all the other pieces of the puzzle click neatly into place. But these simple facts of everyday life that provided many of her ingenious ideas and which Agatha Christie turned into an annual bestseller are observable to all. Everybody knows that…
…some names can be male or female, that nicknames and diminutives can be misleading, or that foreign names often use foreign alphabets…
Or
…that the best place to hide a murder is in a series of murders, or immediately after a natural death, or after an earlier ‘rehearsal’ murder…
Or
…that alibis no longer exist if Body A is identified as Body B and vice versa, or if a live body pretends to be a dead body, or if a killer is not acting alone…
Or
…that narrators are not always reliable, that policemen and children are not always innocent and that ‘foreigners’ are not necessarily guilty…
Or
…that mirrors reverse images, that suicide can be disguised as murder and that sometimes the most obvious person is the villain after all…
None of these facts depend on expert knowledge or an expensive education; they are all self-evident truths known to everyone. And it is on foundations such as these that, for over half-a-century, Agatha Christie built her clever structures of misdirection. Readers happily acknowledged her superiority and were content to let her fool them over and over in her annual Christie for Christmas. As her publishers put it in 1939 on the blurb for Murder is Easy: ‘Surely you won’t let Agatha Christie fool you again. That would be again, wouldn’t it?’ Over 70 years later they are still saying it.
For those of you who like a challenge, and for those of you who like structure to your reading, may I recommend you visit the following site:
http://myreadersblock.blogspot.co.uk/2015/11/vintage-mystery-cover-scavenger-hunt.html
Here you can find details of a Scavenger Hunt Challenge for 2016. The idea is very simple. To complete the challenge you need to read Golden Age titles which feature the items listed in the Scavenger Hunt in their cover illustrations. There are 75 items to locate and, to make things just a teensy bit harder, a book can only be counted once even if it features more than one of the items listed. Could make for some tricky decisions as to which item is the “rarest” when deciding where to record a book in the list.
So I shall be hunting through my copies of Golden Age novels to see which to re-read with a view to making some quick inroads into that list in the New Year.
Mark
The Bodies From The Library 