Murder at the Vicarage

“Makes one think of detective stories. You know—‘Who was she, the mysterious woman with the pale, beautiful face? What was her past history? Nobody knew. There was something faintly sinister about her.’”

This quote about Mrs. Lestrange is the second self-referential and metafictional remark in the first few pages of the book. Griselda talks about some of the more common tropes of the genre, which is Christie’s humorous nod to the reader she assumes knows detective mystery devices. With this remark and others, she pokes fun at her work and that of her peers. She maintains a continuous lighthearted inside joke as the plot incorporates meta-jokes such as Mrs. Lestrange’s on-the-nose name, an early clue that the characters mock-emphasize. This leads readers to take her less seriously as a suspect.

“‘There’s been some fuss about that young artist, Mr. Redding, hasn’t there?’ asked Miss Wetherby. Miss Marple nodded. ‘Colonel Protheroe turned him out of the house. It appears he was painting Lettice in her bathing dress.’”

This quote plants important characterization for two characters and misleads the reader at the same time. The older ladies of the village note Mr. Redding’s attractions, setting him up as the attractive force that manipulates Anne Protheroe. It also shows Miss Marple as the information repository since she knows all about the Lettice incident. Aside from characterization, it misdirects readers regarding the teenager and Mr. Redding, and insinuates a plausible potential motive. Finally, the quote is an early example of the theme of The Dynamics of Village Life as the ladies discuss the personal business and quarrels of their neighbors.

“We are not used to mysteries in St. Mary Mead.”

This quote is both a nod to the theme of The Dynamics of Village Life and another moment of humor as the reader, particularly a modern reader, knows St. Mary Mead is about to become one of the genre’s small towns synonymous with murder much like Cabot Cove is to the show Murder She Wrote. While the Dynamics of Village Life seem peaceful on the surface, the vicar’s statement isn’t accurate. The village ladies frequently create mystery and speculate about their neighbors.

“I felt that hitherto I had misjudged Anne Protheroe’s character. She impressed me now as a very desperate woman, the kind of woman who would stick at nothing once her emotions were aroused. And she was desperately, wildly, madly in love with Lawrence Redding, a man several years younger than herself. I didn’t like it.”

This quote hints at The Evils of Human Nature that lurk in the murderer’s heart. Anne Protheroe hides her true self. The vicar’s recognition, or what Miss Marple would call “intuition,” is an early clue to her guilt. The quote establishes a comparison between Anne and the vicar. Two chapters earlier, Clement reflected, “Why I should have urged Griselda to marry me at the end of twenty-four hours’ acquaintance is a mystery to me. […] Griselda is nearly twenty years younger than myself. She is most distractingly pretty and quite incapable of taking anything seriously” (2). He judges Anne negatively for elements of his own relationship. This is a double standard of the time. An older man might be expected to marry a much younger woman, but the reverse is judged unnatural. The vicar judges Anne by the standards of their day.

“In St. Mary Mead everyone knows your most intimate affairs. There is no detective in England equal to a spinster lady of uncertain age with plenty of time on her hands.”

Clement lays bare the theme of the Dynamics of Village Life to Redding in this quote. Everyone knows everyone’s business in a small town like St. Mary Mead where people have little to do. Police echo this sentiment and Miss Marple, who tells Redding in Chapter 12 that everyone knew he was having an affair with Anne Protheroe (105). Miss Marple exposes the two murderers’ arrogance in thinking they can fool their friends and neighbors.

The quote slightly disparages the elderly women in the village. It is not the first slight to Miss Marple and her peers, but it is the least nefarious comment on the busybody nature of the village’s older women. This quote gives them credit while most characters simply commit The Error of Arrogance in Authority Figures and disregard them.

“‘I’ve got a Mauser pistol,’ said Lawrence.

‘Have you? How exciting. Why do you have it?’

‘Souvenir of the war,’ said Lawrence briefly.”

The pistol is an important symbol of outside forces that infiltrate and create conflict and violence in the community. That it is a Mauser is significant, given British relations with Germany at the time. Lawrence Redding is a newcomer to the village, an outsider who brings with him the violence of the outside world into the peaceful heart of the town, the vicarage. It hints at Lawrence Redding’s character. His comment about his service is nonchalant, but he holds onto a weapon from the war. This hints that his past contains more than he reveals.

“‘Old Protheroe was showing the silver to Stone today,’ volunteered Dennis. ‘Old Stone was pretending to be no end interested in it.’”

This quote promotes a red herring and nods to The Evils of Human Nature. By the end of the novel, the reader knows that Dr. Stone was very interested in the silver because he stole it. Dennis misinterprets his interest as feigned, which shows Dennis’s naiveté about The Evils of Human Nature. The wiser Miss Marple would have been suspicious, but the teenage Dennis assumes Stone is just being polite. He has yet to learn to suspect the people around him. Redding comments that Dr. Stone knows nothing about archeology in an irony where a criminal has a nose for his own.

“It seems to me that if a young man had made up his mind to the great wickedness of taking a fellow creature’s life, he would not appear distraught about it afterwards.”

The murderers cleverly anticipate the reaction of the village inhabitants. They draw on their peers’ assumptions about The Evils of Human Nature and then behave intentionally contrarily to deflect guilt. The younger characters like the vicar and even the police fall for this, but the older characters like Miss Marple don’t rush to conclusions and gather more evidence before a person’s behavior persuades them.

“Rotten thing to happen in one’s house. I must say I’m surprised at young Redding—doing it the way he did. No sort of consideration for anyone’s feelings.”

This quote is an example of The Dynamics of Village Life. The Chief Constable not only feels distress for his friend the vicar, but he experiences outrage at the lack of manners. Etiquette and proper behavior keep the village peaceful, and while Melchett’s quote is humorous, it nods at the indecency of killing someone in the heart of the town itself, the vicarage. It shows a lack of respect for all of St. Mary Mead and its inhabitants and gives a clue about the murderer’s character.

“I suppose I’ve said it rather bluntly, but I never can go into hysterics over anything. I’ve hated him for a long time, and yesterday I shot him.”

Because Lawrence Redding has just confessed, Anne Protheroe’s confession is already under suspicion from the police, the narrator, and the reader. It is a detective genre trope that lovers will confess to the murder to save the other, and Christie has set the reader up to believe this is yet again the case. With these expectations and Mrs. Protheroe’s lack of emotion, the reader and police believe she is lying. Consistent with the theme of The Evils of Human Nature, it turns out she is telling the exact truth, which makes her comment even more cold-blooded. This fulfills, from earlier, Clement’s foreshadowing that Anne is a changed and desperate woman.

“She’s a woman, and women act in that silly way.”

This comment coming from the authority figure of the police Inspector combines the themes of The Dynamics of Village Life and The Error of Arrogance in Authority Figures, and how his beliefs hamper progress. In St. Mary Mead, the residents believe they know each other well enough that they are continually dismissing each other because of gender, job, age, or any reason they can produce at the time. The group that tends to get the most derision is the elderly females. The murderers use their community’s assumptions to cover their tracks, and the result of the police thinking this way about Miss Marple is that the killers nearly get away with their crime.

“[B]ut after all, that is a very sound way of arriving at the truth. It’s really what people call intuition and make such a fuss about. Intuition is like reading a word without having to spell it out. A child can’t do it because it has had so little experience. But a grown-up person knows the word because they’ve seen it often before.”

In this first Miss Marple novel, the detective explains how she discovers criminals. It is a deliberate contrast with Christie’s other famous detective, Hercule Poirot, who talks about his “Little Grey Cells” and his use of superior intellect. In this small speech, Miss Marple pushes back on a culture that engenders Arrogance in Authority Figures and devalues women’s intuition.

“One cannot really like Slack, but one can admire his energy.”

Inspector Slack disparages most of the village and receives his fair share of dislike throughout the novel. The otherwise good-natured vicar takes the lead. In Slack’s situation, however, the writer also slights him. His name and characteristics are a source of continuous fun in classic 1930s British snobbery. The upper classes expect Inspector Slack, a member of a lower class, to hustle, but then they ridicule him for it. He is more of a dated caricature that exposes class biases than a fairly drawn character.

“I do hate old women—they tell you about their bad legs and sometimes insist on showing them to you.”

The Error of Arrogance comes from more than just male authority figures. Griselda supplies many humorous and biting comments. She hosts weekly tea where she teases them and dismisses their concerns, bodies, and fashion. She fails to take Miss Marple seriously until the end when she accepts the veracity of older women’s ideas. She still runs away when she sees Miss Marple coming, however, which shows less progress than her husband. The vicar becomes reverential and even affectionate toward Miss Marple.

“The local excitement was, I need hardly say, tremendous. There had been no murder in St. Mary Mead for at least fifteen years.”

This quote distills the themes of The Dynamics of Village Life and The Evils of Human Nature. The peaceful, idyllic setting and the slow pace of life shatter. The results disturb the residents but stimulate them more than they horrify them. The human reaction in small towns is a fascination with evil rather than eschewing it.

“Most dangerous. Innocent girls—know no better—taken in by a fellow like that—always hanging round women…No good.”

This quote becomes doubly relevant at the novel’s conclusion. The speaker, Dr. Stone, is a conman who steals the silver from Old Hall. That he recognizes a fellow con in Lawrence Redding is telling, just as in Chapter 4 Redding does the same thing, pointing out that Dr. Stone doesn’t seem to know his field. The two evil characters recognize the insidious qualities of each other and point them out to the vicar, and in doing so give the readers a moment of revelation after the novel’s conclusion.

“‘Will you tell me exactly what it is that has upset you?’

‘Tell you that in two words, I can.’ (Here, I may say, she vastly underestimated.) ‘People coming snooping round here when my back’s turned. Poking round. And what business of hers is it, how often the study is dusted or turned out? If you and the missus don’t complain, it’s nobody else’s business. If I give satisfaction to you that’s all that matters, I say.’”

This quote exemplifies another of Christie’s caricatures of the working class that no longer land with readers as they did in the 1930s. The maids in her stories often give indignant, rambling speeches where they air their grievances at mistreatment. They make the characters look foolish. Here Mary, who Clement has noted has been a terrible worker the entire time, something Lettice says offends her enough that she illogically threatens to quit. Moments after this, Clement gets her to stay. The spell of Mary’s silliness both shows Clement’s good nature and adds to the list of Mary’s less desirable traits.

“‘I regard St. Mary Mead,’ he said authoritatively, ‘as a stagnant pond.’

[…] ‘That is really not a very good simile, dear Raymond,’ said Miss Marple briskly. ‘Nothing, I believe, is so full of life under the microscope as a drop of water from a stagnant pool.’”

Miss Marple is again defending her lifestyle and method of sleuthing to a condescending male character, this one being close enough to her that she feels comfortable correcting him. While those on the outside see The Dynamics of Village Life as dull and stagnant, Miss Marple uses Raymond’s simile against him by showing him that the true nature of humanity, specifically The Evils of Human Nature, exists on full display in St. Mary Mead. While one can hide in a city, the proximity of a small village lays bare extraordinary human behavior for Miss Marple to examine like a drop of pond water under a microscope.

“What kind of a doctor is he? An ignorant country practitioner.”

Inspector Slack demonstrates the theme of The Error of Arrogance in Authority Figures when he dismisses the people who disagree with his theories. Because he doesn’t respect other opinions, even those that are intelligent and worthwhile, he looks like a fool and embodies Christie’s caricature of lower-class mentality. Slack’s uniform disgust also contributes to The Dynamics of Village Life. The residents of St. Mary Mead live in such proximity that they get on each other’s nerves, which results in prejudicial comments like this quote.

“Dear Vicar—I think you ought to know what is going on. Your lady has been seen coming out of Mr. Redding’s cottage in a surreptitious manner.”

The Dynamics of Village Life aren’t all serenity and resemble the pond water Miss Marple mentions in Chapter 21. The vitriolic gossip that the hurtful, anonymous letter tries to spread in this chapter is an example of the negative side of village life. Evil and other undesirable human qualities are on display as neighbors watch and report on each other in a way that stirs up the same malignant feelings as during the inquest.

“If I were at any time to set out on a career of deceit, it would be of Miss Marple that I should be afraid.”

In Chapter 26, the village’s attitude toward Miss Marple acknowledges her intellectual prowess. In this quote, Clement reverses his opinion and holds Miss Marple in high regard. While he played a role in gathering and piecing together information, he gives Miss Marple full credit for her role and abilities. This absolves the vicar of The Error of Arrogance in Authority Figures.

“I think each one of us in his secret heart fancies himself as Sherlock Holmes.”

This is one of many metafictional moments in the narrative that either points out tropes or names other famous detectives. Chapter 16 includes an example when a character is accused of reading G. K. Chesterton, a peer of Christie’s. By naming writers and detectives, and poking fun at devices of the genre Christie pays homage to these people and tropes.

“There is always some perfectly good and reasonable explanation for Miss Marple’s omniscience.”

This quote centers on the keen observation of Miss Marple’s solutions. In this instance, she knew Griselda was pregnant not by any sort of divination but because she observed what book Griselda bought at the store. Simple explanations trip the other characters up and inspire their figurative bow to Miss Marple’s greater wisdom as much as intricate ones. The revelation here is gratifying and realistic. This straightforward and plausible solution is an aspect of the Golden Age detective novel that makes novels of this genre comfortable experiences for the reader.