The Murder at the Vicarage
1930 Miss Marple novel by Agatha Christie From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Murder at the Vicarage is a work of detective fiction by the British writer Agatha Christie, first published in the UK by the Collins Crime Club in October 1930[1] and in the US by Dodd, Mead and Company later in the same year.[2][3] The UK edition retailed at seven shillings and sixpence[1] and the US edition at $2.00.[3]
Dust-jacket illustration of the first UK edition | |
| Author | Agatha Christie |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Genre | Crime novel |
| Publisher | Collins Crime Club |
Publication date | October 1930 |
| Publication place | United Kingdom |
| Pages | 256 (first edition, hardcover) |
| Preceded by | Giant's Bread |
| Followed by | The Sittaford Mystery (publication) The Body in the Library (series) |
It is the first novel to feature the character of Miss Marple and her village of St Mary Mead. The character had previously appeared in short stories published in magazines, from December 1927. These earlier stories were collected in book form in The Thirteen Problems in 1932.
Plot summary
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The Reverend Leonard Clement, the vicar of St Mary Mead, narrates the story. He lives with his much younger wife Griselda and his nephew Dennis. Colonel Lucius Protheroe, Clement's churchwarden, is a wealthy, abrasive man who also serves as the local magistrate, and is widely disliked in the village. At dinner one evening, Clement offhandedly remarks that anyone who killed Protheroe would be doing the world a favour.
One day Clement encounters Protheroe's wife, Anne, embracing Lawrence Redding, a young visiting artist; while promising them that he will not reveal their affair, he advises Redding to leave the village at once. The next day, Clement is scheduled to meet Protheroe to go over irregularities in the church accounts. Clement is called away to a farm to visit a dying parishioner, but learns that the man has recovered, and that nobody at the farm had asked for him. Upon returning home, Clement encounters a distressed Redding at the gate to the vicarage, then discovers Colonel Protheroe dead at the writing desk in his study. He summons Dr Haydock, who pronounces that Protheroe was killed by a gunshot to the back of the head.
The police, led by Colonel Melchett and Inspector Slack, are confounded by several details, including a note left by Protheroe that seems to conflict with Haydock's opinion of the time of death, and the claim of some witnesses to have heard a shot in the woods, but no gunshot near or within the house. News spreads quickly, and both Lawrence Redding and Anne Protheroe confess to the murder. However both are exonerated, Redding because he insists on an inaccurate time of death and Anne because Miss Marple had clearly seen that she was not carrying a pistol. Other suspects include: Archer, a man treated harshly by Protheroe for poaching; Mrs Lestrange, a mysterious woman who appeared in the village recently; Dr Stone, an archaeologist excavating a barrow on Protheroe's land; and Stone's young assistant, Miss Cram.
Miss Marple tells Clement she has seven suspects in mind.
Miss Marple sees Miss Cram carrying a suitcase into the woods at midnight; Clement later finds it, along with a small crystal of picric acid. The suitcase proves to contain valuable silver belonging to the Protheroes, and "Dr Stone" turns out to be an impostor who has stolen the identity of a real archaeologist and replaced the Protheroes' belongings with replicas.
Reporters descend on the village as other strange occurrences take place. Mrs Price Ridley receives a threatening phone call. Anne Protheroe discovers in a spare room a portrait slashed to pieces with a knife. A police handwriting expert examines the victim's note and determines that Colonel Protheroe did not write it. Clement is inspired to give a far more vigorous sermon than usual, after which he receives a call from Hawes, his sickly curate, who says he has something to confess.
Clement arrives at Hawes's rooms to find that he has taken an overdose. He discovers the real note Protheroe was writing when he was killed, which reveals that Hawes was responsible for stealing money from the church accounts. Melchett arrives and calls Dr Haydock, but the operator accidentally connects him to Miss Marple, who arrives to see if she can help.
While Haydock takes Hawes to hospital, Miss Marple explains her theory about the true murderer. Her seven suspects are revealed to be: Archer; Mary, the Clements' maid, who had the opportunity; Lettice Protheroe, the Colonel's daughter, who could not stand him; Dennis, whose alibi about a tennis party fails to hold up; either Hawes or Clement, to prevent the Colonel from investigating the church accounts; and Griselda, who is revealed to have returned on an earlier train on the day of the murder. However, none of them are guilty.
Miss Marple believes the killers to be Lawrence Redding and Anne Protheroe. In love with Anne, Redding decided they could be together only if he removed her husband. On the pretext of seeking advice from Clement, he left his pistol in a potted plant holder at the vicarage. He then planted the picric acid crystal in the woods near the vicarage, rigging it to explode and create a "second gunshot" that would confuse any witnesses. In the evening, Redding made the false call to Clement to get him out of the house, while Anne walked past Miss Marple's home without a handbag and in close-fitting clothing to show that she was not carrying a gun. She retrieved the pistol (which had been fitted with a silencer), killed her husband, and left the vicarage; Redding then entered, stole the note incriminating Hawes, and planted his own note falsifying the time of death.
Both conspirators had confessed to the crime, but with obvious falsehoods in their stories, appearing to exonerate the other. Redding drugged Hawes and planted the Colonel's note to make it look as though Hawes had tried to kill himself out of guilt.
Dr Haydock saves Hawes's life. Miss Marple proposes a trap that tricks Redding into incriminating himself; he and Anne are arrested by Inspector Slack's men.
The ending ties up the loose ends. Lettice reveals that Mrs Lestrange is her mother, Colonel Protheroe's first wife, who is terminally ill; Lettice destroyed the portrait of the first Mrs Protheroe in Old Hall so that the police would not identify Mrs Lestrange as her and suspect her. Lettice and Mrs Lestrange depart to spend the latter's last days travelling the world. Miss Cram is revealed to have known nothing about the false Dr Stone's plot, and Griselda and Dennis confess to having threatened Mrs Price Ridley as a practical joke. Griselda tells her husband that she is pregnant, which Miss Marple had deduced.
Alongside the murder mystery plot, the novel includes alternative perspectives on the idea of crime. Miss Marple's nephew, Raymond West, attempts to solve the crime via Freudian psychoanalysis, while Dr Haydock expresses his view that criminal behaviour is a disease that will soon be solved by doctors instead of police.
Characters
- Miss Marple: a spinster living in St Mary Mead, next door to the vicar. She is observant and understands human behaviour, and is recognised in her village as astute and generally correct.
- Colonel Lucius Protheroe: a wealthy man, the churchwarden and local magistrate in St Mary Mead, who lives at Old Hall. He has grown deaf, and shouts a lot as a result. He is found shot dead early in the novel, which is based on this murder.
- Anne Protheroe: the second wife of Colonel Protheroe, young and attractive. She is having an affair with Lawrence Redding.
- Lettice Protheroe: Colonel Protheroe's daughter from his first marriage, to Mrs Estelle Lestrange. She despises Anne Protheroe, her stepmother.
- Leonard Clement: the vicar of St Mary Mead and narrator of the story, in his early forties. He is an instrumental figure in this story’s development, as the murder occurs in his house.
- Griselda Clement: the vicar's young wife, 25 years old and a happy person. She is revealed to be pregnant at the end of the novel.
- Dennis Clement: the vicar's teenage nephew, part of his household.
- Mary Adams: the Clements' housemaid and cook. She is a terrible cook and shows disrespect to the vicar and his wife. She is going out with Bill Archer.
- Mr Hawes: Clement's curate, newly arrived in the parish. He had suffered acute Encephalitis lethargica (a sleepwalking disease) before coming to St Mary Mead.
- Mrs Martha Price Ridley: a widow and gossip who lives next to the vicarage, at the end of the road.
- Miss Amanda Hartnell: a spinster in St Mary Mead.
- Miss Caroline Wetherby: a spinster in St Mary Mead who lives next door to Miss Hartnell.
- Dr Haydock: a doctor living in St Mary Mead. He is trying to protect Mrs Lestrange, for she has only a month to live.
- Lawrence Redding: a painter who fought in the First World War. He uses a building in the vicarage grounds as his studio and has been painting a number of women in St Mary Mead. He is having an affair with Anne Protheroe and has had many quarrels with Colonel Protheroe.
- Mrs Estelle Lestrange: an elegant woman who came to the village recently and keeps herself to herself. Lettice Protheroe is her daughter. She has only weeks left to live.
- Raymond West: Miss Marple's nephew, a writer who usually lives in London.
- Rose and Gladdie: the parlour maid and the kitchen maid respectively at Old Hall, Colonel Protheroe's house. Gladdie tells Redding what she overheard when Mrs Lestrange visited Old Hall.
- Bill Archer: a local man whom Protheroe in his role as magistrate has jailed more than once for poaching.
- Inspector Slack: the local police detective, who is very active despite his name, and often abrasive.
- Colonel Melchett: the Chief Constable for the county.
- Dr Stone: an archaeologist carrying out a dig on Colonel Protheroe's land. He turns out to be a fraud.
- Gladys Cram: Dr Stone's secretary, in her early twenties.
Literary significance and reception
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The Times Literary Supplement of 6 November 1930 concluded, "As a detective story, the only fault of this one is that it is hard to believe the culprit could kill Prothero [sic] so quickly and quietly. The three plans of the room, garden, and village show that almost within sight and hearing was Miss Marple, who 'always knew every single thing that happened and drew the worst inferences.' And three other 'Parish cats' (admirably portrayed) were in the next three houses. It is Miss Marple who does detect the murderer in the end, but one suspects she would have done it sooner in reality."[4]
The review of the novel in The New York Times Book Review of 30 November 1930 begins, "The talented Miss Christie is far from being at her best in her latest mystery story. It will add little to her eminence in the field of detective fiction." The review went on to say that, "the local sisterhood of spinsters is introduced with much gossip and click-clack. A bit of this goes a long way and the average reader is apt to grow weary of it all, particularly of the amiable Miss Marple, who is sleuth-in-chief of the affair." The reviewer summarised the set-up of the plot and concluded, "The solution is a distinct anti-climax."[5]
H.C. O'Neill, in The Observer of 12 December 1930, wrote, "here is a straightforward story which very pleasantly draws a number of red herrings across the docile reader's path. There is a distinct originality in her new expedient for keeping the secret. She discloses it at the outset, turns it inside out, apparently proves that the solution cannot be true, and so produces an atmosphere of bewilderment."[6]
In the Daily Express of 16 October 1930, Harold Nicolson said, "I have read better works by Agatha Christie, but that does not mean that this last book is not more cheerful, more amusing, and more seductive than the generality of detective novels."[7] In a short review dated 15 October 1930, the Daily Mirror review declared: "Bafflement is well sustained."[8]
Sixty years later, Robert Barnard wrote that the novel is "[o]ur first glimpse of St Mary Mead, a hotbed of burglary, impersonation, adultery and ultimately murder. What is it precisely that people find so cosy about such stories?" He found the resolution a little hard to believe, but believed that the story was more appealing to readers of 1990 than to those of 1930. "The solution boggles the mind somewhat, but there are too many incidental pleasures to complain, and the strong dose of vinegar in this first sketch of Miss Marple is more to modern taste than the touch of syrup in later presentations."[9]
Christie herself later wrote: "Reading Murder at the Vicarage now, I am not so pleased with it as I was at the time. It has, I think, far too many characters, and too many sub-plots. But at any rate the main plot is sound."[10]
Allusions in other novels
The vicar and his wife, Leonard and Griselda Clement, who make their first appearance in this novel, continued to appear in Miss Marple stories. Notably, they feature in The Body in the Library (1942), along with Slack and Melchett, and 4.50 from Paddington (1957).
The character of Miss Marple had previously appeared in short stories published in magazines from December 1927 onwards. These earlier stories were collected in The Thirteen Problems in 1932.
Adaptations to other media
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Murder at the Vicarage (1949 play)
The story was adapted into a play by Moie Charles and Barbara Toy in 1949, which opened at the Playhouse Theatre on 16 December 1949. Miss Marple was played by Barbara Mullen, who at the time was only 35 years of age.
Television adaptations
British adaptations
The BBC adapted the book into a film which was first broadcast on 25 December 1986, with Joan Hickson as Miss Marple, Paul Eddington as the vicar, and Polly Adams as Anne Protheroe. The adaptation was generally very close to the original novel with four major exceptions: the trap which exposes the killer is changed to involve another murder attempt, the characters of Dennis, Dr Stone and Gladys Cram are deleted, Bill Archer is present in the kitchen while the murder takes place, and Anne kills herself out of remorse rather than being tried.
It was presented again in 2004 by Granada Television in the ITV series Agatha Christie's Marple with Geraldine McEwan as Miss Marple, Tim McInnerny as the vicar, Derek Jacobi as Colonel Protheroe, and Janet McTeer as Anne. This version eliminates the characters of Dr Stone and Gladys Cram, replacing them with the elderly French professor Dufosse and his granddaughter Hélène. Other changes include the elimination of Miss Weatherby, the changing of Mrs Price-Ridley's first name from Martha to Marjorie, the renaming of Bill Archer to Frank Tarrent, the change of the false gunshot to a shot with a double-barrelled shotgun, and the addition of a plotline in which the Colonel stole 10,000 francs from the French Resistance, which led to the death of an agent.[clarification needed] Two major departures from the book are the portrayal of Miss Marple as Anne's close friend and the addition of a series of flashbacks to December 1915, when a younger Miss Marple (played by Julie Cox) was engaged in a love affair with a married soldier.
In both versions the vicar's role is reduced and he does not participate in the investigation, since his presence as narrator is unnecessary in a filmed version.
French adaptation
The novel was adapted as a 2016 episode of the French television series Les Petits Meurtres d'Agatha Christie.
Radio adaptation
The book was adapted for radio by Michael Bakewell, with June Whitfield as Miss Marple, Francis Matthews as the Rev. Leonard Clement, and Imelda Staunton as Griselda Clement. This adaptation was first broadcast by the BBC in 1993.
Graphic novel adaptation
The Murder at the Vicarage was released by HarperCollins as a graphic novel adaptation on 20 May 2008, adapted and illustrated by "Norma" (Norbert Morandière) (ISBN 0-00-727460-2). This was translated from the edition first published in France by Emmanuel Proust éditions in 2005 under the title of L'Affaire Prothéroe.
Publication history
- 1930, Collins Crime Club (London), October 1930, hardcover, 256 pp
- 1930, Dodd Mead and Company (New York), 1930, hardcover, 319 pp
- 1948, Penguin Books, paperback (Penguin number 686), 255 pp
- 1948, Dell Books (New York), paperback, 223 pp
- 1961, Fontana Books (imprint of HarperCollins), paperback, 191 pp
- 1976, Greenway edition of collected works (William Collins), hardcover, 251 pp, ISBN 0-00-231543-2
- 1978, Greenway edition of collected works (Dodd Mead and Company), hardcover, 251 pp
- 1980, Ulverscroft Large Print edition, hardcover, 391 pp, ISBN 0-7089-0476-9
- 2005, Marple Facsimile edition (facsimile of 1930 UK first edition), 12 September 2005, hardcover, ISBN 0-00-720842-1
The novel was first serialised in the US in the Chicago Tribune in fifty-five instalments from Monday, 18 August to Monday, 20 October 1930.
Book dedication
The dedication of the book reads:
"To Rosalind"
The subject of this dedication is Agatha Christie's only child, Rosalind Hicks (1919–2004), the daughter of her first marriage, to Archibald Christie (1890–1962). Rosalind was eleven years of age at the time of the publication of the book.
References
External links
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