Miss Marple finishes up the six stories of the Tuesday Night Club with a tale of murder that she relates without even losing track of her knitting. I mean, she does have to work at it a bit (“One, two, three, four, five, and then three purl; that is right. Now, what was I saying?”), but she’s more than up to the task.

The answer to the question of who killed Geoffrey Denman is so obscure that Miss Marple doesn’t even give the other members of the Club an opportunity to suggest their own solutions. Because there’s just no way any of them would have come up with it even if she gave them a lifetime of guesses. Which in a way is too bad because the killer is one of the more delightfully wicked ones in the Marple oeuvre, and the insight that leads to her solution of the matter is an interesting one. An insight that comes through an act of divination, which I had to grin at because at the end of the day where does inspiration and insight really come from and how does it happen? You might as well posit a supernatural force.

In any event, the insight she has is that communication always has a context, and if we just look at the bare words that come out of people’s mouths then we’d be lost trying to understand their meaning. Indeed, they’d only be sounds. So Miss Marple takes the last sounds of Geoffrey Denman and manages to come up with something I don’t think anyone else on the planet would have come up with, but which is of course correct.

Underlying not just the method but the whole foundation of the series is Miss Marple’s declaration that “human nature is much the same everywhere, and, of course, one has the opportunities of observing it at close quarters in a village.” This is so close to something Jane Austen said about her writing that it made me wonder if Christie gave Miss Marple the first name of Jane as a kind of homage. Such a view is both expansive (seeing the whole world and all its rich variety in a small town or village) and limiting (because human nature tells us that most crimes are the result of only a few basic drives, the primary ones being sex and money).

Plus Randy and Joyce are engaged. But I think everyone had figured that out already. Aunt Jane doesn’t get any points for that.

Marple index