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.

Marple index

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