Miss Marple was already a dinosaur when Agatha Christie introduced the character in 1927’s “The Tuesday Night Club.” Her age seemed to be fluid as times changed (the last book featuring her was published in the 1970s) but she always remained an old lady, meaning somewhere north of 70. In 4:50 from Paddington it’s said that her 90th birthday is coming up, but usually Christie avoided being that specific.
Biological age isn’t what I’m talking about though. Just as she remained a perennially old lady, Jane was also an eternal Victorian, wary of any fashion or behaviour that might be labeled “modern.” And it’s that old-fashioned character that Dreda Say Mitchell leans into in “A Deadly Wedding Day,” a story set sometime in the 1960s. Miss Marple has been invited to a wedding and she’s immediately put out (as much as she can be put out, which is to say mildly) by guests who resemble actors “from one of those modern New Wave films that critics seemed to enjoy so much but which left their audiences thoroughly confused.” One guest in particular makes a special impression: a willowy woman “sporting a blond Vidal Sassoon bobbed haircut and a tan.” I don’t know which of these, the haircut or the tan, Miss M is more shocked by. Anyway, the same woman wears “what was known in the more salacious newspapers as a ‘mini-skirt.’ It was immodestly short and certainly not the kind of attire you would expect a respectable young lady to wear to a wedding reception.”
Don’t worry if you think this is a giveaway that the willowy blonde is being introduced as too obvious a suspect though, as she’s dead pretty quickly. That leaves Miss M and an old friend she first met during the Blitz to figure out who poisoned the victim’s fruit salad. This is done pretty handily, and enjoyably, albeit not in a way that’s very easy to play along with. The main wrinkle is that Miss Marple is aware of social conventions and can actually buck them in ways that turn out to be helpful. For example, she gets some information out of the groom by suggesting that the bride make a speech at the reception, which has one old lawyer in attendance think that she’s “a radical or something.” But seeing as these are the 1960s and “the world was swinging, and changing fast,” her suggestion carries the day. More to the point in this case though is that Miss Marple has enlightened views on race relations, since the bride is a black woman. “While one might hope,” she muses, “that, in the England of the 1960s, racial prejudice would be a thing of the past, sadly that was not the case.” Despite being a dinosaur, Miss M is actually ahead of her times here, as England in the 1960s, like most places in the world at the time, had definitely not moved past racial prejudice. By coincidence, the story that appears before this one in the anthology Marple: Twelve New Stories, “The Jade Empress,” emphasizes the same progressive racial perspective. Now sure that’s more our perspective than that of a Victorian lady or a conservative woman in 1960s England, but I think it’s a dramatically productive way of playing with the character.
