Helen's weekly column about the fictional characters who've inspired her... (Can I just add that I wanted a non-TV/movie pic to go with this, but couldn't find one ... so I picked the one that made me laugh the most.)
Miss Marple. Some might feel a strange choice of heroine, especially considering my last two were tomboys, and shall I say, slightly younger. But, you see, I’m thinking ahead, to when I’m seventy plus, hoping that a) I make it that far, and b) my faculties are half as sharp as hers.
Created by the late, great Agatha Christie, Jane Marple is born around sixty five years of age in the late 1920s, appearing in her first novel The Murder at the Vicarage (she also appeared in several short stories around the same time). She lives in the quiet, pretty village of St. Mary Mead - which is the backdrop to many a murder.
She doesn’t look like a detective. In her earlier books she typically wore a black dress, black lace gloves and a lace cap. After the Second World War she reappeared a little more youthful, more contemporary. Still grey haired, wearing tweed and doing her knitting. She also has rheumatism, stiff fingers, a stiff neck, poor eyesight (at times), her hearing starts to go and occasionally she has pneumonia. This does not stop her quest for uncovering the truth, often saving innocent people from being hung for a crime they did not commit and instead trapping the real criminals.
In her time she has caught countless murderers, foiled burglaries, blackmail plots, embezzlements and other evil wrong doings. How? “You simply cannot afford to believe everything that people tell you,” she would say. As Christie herself said of her; “She always expected the worst of everyone and everything, and was, with almost frightening accuracy, usually proved right.”
Miss Marple acts like a frail, fluttery old woman, making people open up to her. After all how dangerous could she be, this harmless old lady? But behind the clacking of the knitting needles, this intelligent, shrewd lady is observing. Listening. Letting people talk and letting them effectively, quite literally in those days, hang themselves. She often arrives at her conclusions through being reminded of parallel, but more trivial incidents in St. Mary Mead. Then she would ramble on with a seemingly irrelevant analogy talking “away about maids and desserts” until wham, she names the culprit and they realise she has known about them all along. You can not help but be impressed.
At other times though, the fine actress as she is, can adapt her personality and become more astute, soothing, and at times incredibly cunning and devious, telling lies and setting elaborate traps. In certain cases she lends herself as bait or actually catches the murderer. A very brave woman.
‘Never judge a book by its cover’ is a cliché that applies rigorously to Jane Marple. She may look frail. The Police and criminals seriously underestimate her. For the criminals they do so at their cost. Many Chief Inspectors gradually come to respect this amazing woman. According to one Police Officer she has got “the Chief Constables of at least three counties in her pocket.” This women is formidable, even going into her eighties.
She isn’t a feminist, she can be quite old maid-ish and traditional at times, but she is a fine example of a strong, independent woman, capably getting on with her life. For Miss Marple nothing could be nicer, in her twilight years, than having a nice juicy murder to solve.
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