Finally a good Miss Marple story. The setting is familiar, with Miss Marple invited to a dinner at the Bantry estate, where she listens to a ghost story about the wife of a friend of Colonel Bantry being frightened to death by a strange prophecy. Or at least so it seems. But Miss Marple isn’t having any of it: “You see, if I were going to kill anyone – which, of course, I wouldn’t dream of doing for a minute, because it would be very wicked . . . I shouldn’t be at all satisfied to trust to fright.” Instead there’s a complicated plot involving the usual ruses (chemicals, poison, disguise). But the solution comes by way of a single clue that is nicely slipped in and that plays fair. What I mean is that you don’t have to know about hundreds and thousands or Somerset House, but just pay attention to something that gets said in passing that is revealed to be significant later when something else is said, again in passing. It’s the sort of thing you can smile at and say “OK, I missed that, but it was very clever.” I think that’s the most you can say for a short mystery story, so well done!

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One of the more controversial bits of information coming out along with the revelations, first made in the Toronto Star this past week, that author Alice Munro knew about her husband’s sexual interference with her daughter and chose to say and do nothing about it, is that, as the Star reported, this is something “everybody knew.”

By “everybody” what I think is meant is anyone with any interest in the matter. Including, as further reporting has turned up, Munro’s biographer, her publisher, and other parts of the Canadian media. Robert Thacker, an academic who wrote a biography of Munro, was interviewed by the Washington Post and had this to say in his defence:

“Clearly she [Munro’s daughter, who had told him of the matter] hoped — or she hoped at that time, anyway — that I would make it public,” he told The Post on Monday. “I wasn’t prepared to do that. And the reason I wasn’t prepared to do that is that, it wasn’t that kind of book. I wasn’t writing a tell-all biography. And I’ve lived long enough to know that stuff happens in families that they don’t want to talk about and that they want to keep in families.”

Leaving aside the odd idea that when a family member approached Thacker wanting to make a story public, he saw this as an example of something that families didn’t want to talk about and make public, I want to focus on his claim that he was not writing “that kind of book.”

Hm. What “kind of book” would that be? Here’s the publisher’s description of Thacker’s Alice Munro: Writing Her Lives: A Biography:

This is the book about one of the world’s great authors, Alice Munro, which shows how her life and her stories intertwine.

For almost thirty years Robert Thacker has been researching this book, steeping himself in Alice Munro’s life and work, working with her co-operation to make it complete. The result is a feast of information for Alice Munro’s admirers everywhere.

By following “the parallel tracks” of Alice Munro’s life and Alice Munro’s texts, he gives a thorough and revealing account of both her life and work.

Let’s flag this bit: “working with her co-operation to make it complete.” How much confidence does that inspire that you’re going to read a complete, or thorough and revealing, bio?

But to return to “not that kind of book.” Where had I heard that before? Might it have been when Peter Biskind was attacked for not mentioning anything about Harvey Weinstein’s predatory habits (a pattern of conduct that “everybody knew” about) when Biskind had been writing a book on Weinstein? As I wrote previously: while admitting he knew about these rumours Biskind never raised them with Weinstein, saying “I never asked him about it because . . . I didn’t feel it was relevant to what I was doing.” Not that kind of book, you see.

Well, I’ve said it before. And then again. And then again and again. Munro’s name even came up in one of those earlier posts, and her attempts to “control the narrative” by cutting off another academic who was writing about her. This was not a mistake Thacker was going to make. From the Post story: “Thacker said that he and Munro spoke about the matter in 2008, when they met in a restaurant for an interview. Munro asked him to turn off his recorder.” Which I assume he did. “Working with her co-operation . . .” If you want to see an author raked over the coals, try dipping your toe in the comment thread following the Post story online.

So just to repeat the key takeaway: access always comes with strings attached, which turns the job of biographer into that of publicist. As the old saying goes, if you’re not reading something that somebody doesn’t want you to read, you’re reading an ad.

Again Miss Marple remains in the background. At least in the early going, this was a big part of her character and her method. Recall her quietly knitting through the stories of The Tuesday Night Club, or the fact that she isn’t the narrator of The Murder at the Vicarage and indeed isn’t a major presence in that book at all. In The Body in the Library she doesn’t even appear very often. She’s not the sort of detective to lead a very active investigation, looking for clues, or interviewing witnesses. Sure she does a bit of that, but mostly she just notices things. Luckily, the police are willing, if not always happy, to have her along for the ride.

Marple’s process of ratiocination goes from the local to the universal, the incidental to the supremely important. We’re told she “had attained fame by her ability to link up trivial village happenings with graver problems in such a way as to throw light upon the latter.” But to be honest I never see a lot of that happening. We just have to take it on faith, since any village happenings are only slightly alluded to. What seems more on tap here is a literary diversion. “Bodies are always being found in libraries in books. I’ve never known a case in real life,” says gruff Colonel Bantry, just before finding a body in his library. Christie herself introduced the book as having been written out of a desire to play a “Variation on a well-known Theme,” with the theme being the body in the library, recognized to be a cliché of the detective story. This made me wonder how many bodies had been found in libraries before this book (which was first published in 1942). I guess a lot.

Otherwise this seems much the usual puzzle for Jane to solve. The killers hatch an insanely complicated plot, which is made even more difficult to untangle because the innocent guy they attempt to frame behaves in a ridiculous manner. He’s the one who thinks it would be a neat idea to hide the body in the library of Colonel Bantry, just because he doesn’t like the Colonel very much. And I guess he was drunk. Throw in the absurd idea that only one person has to (mis)identify the dead body or else the whole scheme would instantly fall apart and you’ve got something so farfetched I don’t think it’s being fair to the reader. And then you get another of those clues that depends on a bit of specifically British knowledge, like the “banting” and “hundreds and thousands” that I pulled a blank on in “The Tuesday Night Club.” The clue here is a passing reference to Somerset House, which at the time was where the Registry of Births, Marriages and Deaths had its offices. But the Registry moved in 1970 and I don’t think that’s something anyone would be likely to get today. I didn’t understand what its mention meant even after I’d been alerted as to its significance.

Of course there are other Britishisms that I failed to grasp, like “beer and skittles,” but they weren’t as important and only gave the proceedings a bit of period charm.

And finally, since I’m on a roll here, the business with the fingernails is quite obscure.

To be honest, after having re-read the first Miss Marple stories and then the first two novels I’ve come away thinking they’re markedly inferior to Christie’s Poirot mysteries. And I’m not sure I liked them any better when I read them the first time forty or more years ago. As noted, the plots are bonkers, and not in a good way, as much as Miss Marple herself would want to object.

“An intricate plot,” said Colonel Melchett.

“Not more intricate than the steps of a dance,” said Miss Marple.

“I suppose not.”

Of course, the undoing of the intricacy is the point of the exercise, which is why the plot has to be so complex. There’s a nice moment here where it’s suggested that the “explanation of the whole case” may be criminal insanity, but this is immediately dismissed by the police superintendent as being “too easy.” “There are such cases,” he had earlier admitted, “but we’ve no knowledge of anyone of that kind operating in this neighbourhood.” “One does see so much evil in a village,” Miss Marple explains at another point. But not that kind of evil. As I’ve mentioned before, for Christie there are only three motives for crime: sex, greed, and lunacy. And she has no interest in lunacy because it can’t be explained in a clever way. We’re more used to psychopaths in our own time because they get so much media attention. Back in Miss Marple’s day they weren’t as interesting.

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HMS Valiant, in her glory days.

The Battle of Cape Matapan was a naval engagement fought between ships of the British and Australian navies and the Royal Italian Navy from 27 to 29 March 1941 in the Mediterranean Sea. It was a clear victory for the allies, as they sank five Italian ships without losing any of their own, but it didn’t have great strategic importance, mainly serving to limit Italy’s operations in the Eastern Mediterranean for a while. For military historians, however, it is distinguished as “the first big naval battle of World War II” and “the only large fleet action in the war which took place outside the Pacific theater.”

Such, anyway, is the judgment of William Koenig in his chapter on the battle included in a coffee-table book called Two Centuries of Warfare. That book was published in 1978 and it was hanging around the house when I was a kid. At some point, I believe around 1980, in fell into the hands of a family acquaintance who had actually been involved in the battle as a member of the Royal Canadian Naval Volunteer Reserve, serving I believe as a radar operator on the battleship Valiant (the use of radar played an important role in the British victory). He wrote up a note on his own observations in response, and it was kept stuck in the pages of the book. I recently rediscovered it when the book was getting ready to be tossed out in a house-cleaning exercise. I thought I’d post a transcript of it here just because it’s worth holding on to these eyewitness/participant accounts of history before they’re lost entirely. Unfortunately I no longer remember the name of the fellow who wrote the note and I can’t make it out from his signature. But for anyone interested in the battle, here’s what he had to say (I’ve given a literal transcript, with no editing for spelling or grammar).

This is not quite as it happened. The Italian ships Pola, Zara and Fiume were first picked up by Valiant’s radar at about 15 mile range which permitted the British ships Warspite, Valiant and Barham to close the Italian ships. At about 3000 yards range the ships were [?] to starboard in line a head and passed the Italian ships at about 2900 yd. range. Using radar range bearings the search lights were turned on and the battle ships opened fire with the results as indicated in the book. Of interest is the fact that Prince Philip now Duke of Edinburgh a midshipman at the time manned one of the search lights. I was passing range and bearings to him over the ships intercom system.

A characteristic of a lot of detective fiction is that it’s quickly consumed and just as quickly forgotten. We remember the classics – The Hound of the Baskervilles, Murder on the Orient Express – but the others disappear from our minds so quickly that we can read the same book just a year or even months later and be unable to remember the first thing about them. At least this is true for me, as it was for my mother, who always had a mystery novel (or several) by her bedside. When I commented on the fact that she’d read some of them before she’d reply that it didn’t matter because she could no longer remember whodunit.

One reason I think this happens is because a lot of what goes on in a mystery novel is supposed to be quickly forgotten. Important clues are skimmed over in such a way that you’re meant to miss them. Is it any wonder they vanish from our minds when the book is done?

That’s just a theory of mine. But it helps explain how, when I came to write up these notes on The Murder at the Vicarage only a couple of weeks after finishing reading it, I could no longer recall who it was that had been killed at the vicarage, who had done the killing, and why. And this wasn’t a momentary lapse of recall. I tried for hours to think of what had happened in the book and couldn’t come up with anything.

At any rate, the story has it that Colonel Protheroe is shot in the vicar’s study, and there are no end of suspicious characters floating around. The vicar himself is the narrator, and he finds the discovery of a body in his study quite upsetting not just for personal reasons but because “nothing exciting ever happens” in town. “There are had been no murder in St. Mary Mead for at least fifteen years,” and as a result they “are not used to mysteries.” Seeing as this was the first Miss Marple novel, these might be taken as famous last words. But once Jane is on the case he knows things are in good hands. “There is no detective in England equal to a spinster lady of uncertain age with plenty of time on her hands.” Especially when that spinster is “not the type of elderly lady who makes mistakes. She has got the uncanny knack of always being right.”

Miss Marple operates, as usual, in the background. I’ve mentioned how the vicar tells the story and the truth is we don’t get to see the detective spinster doing much. Which isn’t too much of a problem as it also seems natural for the police to invite any respectable citizens to join them in the investigation by sitting in on interviews of suspects and inspecting evidence and the like. Those were the days!

It’s also nice that Miss Marple isn’t as direct a presence because she is a pain in the ass. As Robert Barnard remarked of this novel, “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.” I don’t know. I don’t like the vinegar or the syrup, to be honest. She’s either bitchy or a quietly superior know-it-all with the uncanny knack of always being right? Those aren’t great options.

The plot is pure Christie, and features most of her staple elements. The theatricality of the crime, with its ridiculously complicated staging (the business of faking the gunshot had me rolling my eyes in a loop). The importance of a strict time scheme, which can also be cleverly manipulated. Two or more killers working together to give each other alibis. The simplicity of motive, which always comes down to lust or greed. A third category, of mental disturbance or “queerness,” is never in play. The doctor may have his medical theories to explain crime, but Miss Marple knows better, being a student of that great generality “Human Nature.”

There are also those dated references that a twenty-first century reader may take some time figuring out. One of the girls here is described as having “Lots of S.A.” It took me a while to decide that this must mean sex appeal. (In the story “The Herb of Death” Miss Marple herself had to have it explained.) And here’s another siren who the vicar observes with disapproval: “Her legs, which were encased in particularly shiny pink stockings, were crossed, and I had every opportunity of observing that she wore pink striped silk knickers.” This struck me as shocking until I realized that “knickers” in this context must have been referring to something like a slip.

But in the end I didn’t care for this one very much. It’s a weak mystery, and the explanation confusing, far-fetched, and uninteresting. For a book only too aware of its status as a mystery (there are repeated references to the events being just like a mystery novel), it doesn’t play as very clever or arch. And as I say, as soon as it’s finished it’s forgotten.

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