51 pages • 1 hour read
Agatha ChristieMurder at the Vicarage
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1930A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Authorial Context: Agatha Christie
Dame Agatha Christie (1890-1976) is one of the biggest names in detective fiction, and literary historians credit her with creating many classic tropes of the genre. Dubbed The Queen of Crime, she is the best-selling fiction writer of all time, with 66 detective novels, 14 short story collections, and 20 stage plays, one of which, The Mouse Trap, holds the record for the world’s longest-running production. She also wrote six more novels under the name Mary Westmacott. Her first novel The Mysterious Affair at Styles appeared in 1916 and features the Belgian detective Hercule Poirot. Her most well-known characters and detectives are Poirot and Miss Marple.
While these two characters are very different in their backgrounds, personalities, and methods of solving crimes, Christie uses similar literary devices such as specific settings, character traits, and clarity of style, which have become hallmarks of her work. Her devices are widely imitated by those who came after her. In most of her books, closed settings such as the small town of St. Mary Mead in Murder at the Vicarage or the snow-bound train in Murder on the Orient Express force a limited number of characters together. These characters are often less complex to make them easy for the reader to absorb and draw conclusions about. Christie uses the assumptions made by the reader to mislead and misdirect. Though her characters are often two-dimensional, Christie makes them feel realistic with the same easily absorbed traits and focuses the majority of her writing on the plot puzzle of the murder rather than character development. Because her prose is clear and succinct and her dialog is realistic, the story achieves a clarity that balances any confusion that might arise from clues or aspects of the crime.
While her narrators and characters are often humorous, such as the Vicar Leonard Clement in Murder at the Vicarage, Christie’s work uses stereotypes and caricatures of her era to create quick, relatable (for her time) personalities that her contemporary readers would find amusing and recognizable. Modern reconsideration of these stereotypes, however, can grate on current sensibilities and have been one of the main criticisms of her work. Despite this, Agatha Christie is considered one of the undoubted masters of the genre, her name is next to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s as co-creators of the detective novel as we know it.
Genre Context: The Golden Age Detective Novel
Mystery is a large genre that contains many subcategories. Agatha Christie and contemporaries like Dorothy Sayers and Ngaio Marsh are part of The Golden Age of detective stories. Their work shares similar criteria and tropes that have influenced generations of writers who continue to utilize their rules and techniques in modern subgenres such as the Cozy mystery and the Historical detective story.
One of the most obvious tropes of the Golden Age detective story is the setting. Murders take place in genteel, mainly upper-class worlds with main characters who belong to higher levels of society, though seldom at the extreme top. Authors in this genre employ insular settings to limit the number of suspects and allow ease of exploration by the detective. Country houses, small villages such as St. Mary Mead, colleges, hotels, and theaters are all common examples of places these authors use.
Similarly, the class of primary characters is selective. While servants and the working class abound, they are sources of information and humor rather than main characters. Golden Age protagonists and suspects are often the landed gentry and ranking military men. Those without titles come from similar backgrounds, shown through obvious levels of education and understanding of social customs such as the Vicar and Miss Marple in Murder at the Vicarage.
In keeping with this strict characterization, the sleuth in these stories is usually a gentleman detective, or in Miss Marple’s situation, a gentlewoman. Dorothy Sayers’s Lord Peter, Ngaio Marsh’s Rodrick Alleyn, the brother of a baron, and Miss Marple are all comfortable in and indeed belong to the world of the upper class. There is, however, some feature that makes them all outsiders. This position gives them the vantage point to see the mysteries clearly. Miss Marple is an outsider due to age and marital status. Hercule Poirot is seen as a foreigner despite his long residence in England. Even Lord Peter and Rodrick Alleyn exist apart from the rest of their social circle due to peculiarities from their extreme intelligence and powers of observation.
Gentleman class status carries behavioral expectations for the Golden Age detective. Golden Age detectives never use violence or force to solve a crime. These protagonists solve puzzles with intellectual superiority and deductive reasoning. Golden Age detective stories provide the reader with a window into everything the detective experiences. There is a spirit of fair play that runs through the Golden Age story. Truly supernatural occurrences, doubles, and anything that requires specialized knowledge like obscure poisons don’t appear in Golden Age novels unless the author establishes them at the beginning as part of the subgenre’s rules of straight dealing. In another Christie novel, A Pocket Full of Rye, the characters discuss at great length, for the benefit of the reader, the poison taxine.
While murder is the usual crime in all detective novels, the Golden Age stories limit themself to specific motives and depictions of violence. Gritty, dark realities of violence are absent in Golden Age mysteries. While murder is still a dark subject, novels of this subgenre employ sanitized language in crime scene descriptions and motives. This is less likely to disturb readers. The aim of the stories is not to muse on the darkness of life but rather to enjoy solving intellectual puzzles. While other subgenres of the detective story include existential commentary, the Golden Age story aims to entertain rather than to philosophize, and even when Miss Marple comments on The Evils of Human Nature, she never goes deeply into it. Motives like greed or illicit love are more common than a character driven to murder by starvation or the darker side of human existence. The victims often behave before their death in ways that help readers feel little regret over their fate. Obnoxious bullies and odious individuals such as Colonel Protheroe in Murder at the Vicarage are typical targets, rather than innocent people. This provides a basis for schadenfreude, or a sense of poetic justice, to kick off the mystery plot.
The endings expand this sense of justice and create the well-being brought about by the mental puzzle’s solution, and the world returns to order. In Murder at the Vicarage, for example, the schedule of everyday life returns after Miss Marple solves the mystery and Griselda’s pregnancy announcement enforces the blissful continuation of life in a small village. The good life returns at the end because justice is served.
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