Angelo J. Pompano
Who Is Agatha Christie?
Agatha Christie first introduced the world to Miss Jane Marple, one of the world’s most affable fictional detectives, with “Murder at the Vicarage” which was published in 1930. Her other famous detective, Hercule Poirot, had appeared ten years earlier in
The Mysterious Affair at Styles
, which was her first manuscript.
She was born Agatha Miller on September 15, 1890, in Devon, England, where she was educated by her mother. During World War I she worked as a volunteer nurse. In 1914 she married Col. Archibald Christie. They divorced in 1928 but, as she already had a huge following as the result of the publication of “The Murder of Roger Ackroyd” in 1926, she kept his name. In 1930 she married archaeologist Sir Max Mallowan. The influence of her frequent expeditions with him to the Middle East can be seen in such works as “Death on the Nile” which was published in 1937.
Her stories are marked by inventive plotting which has made her one of the most popular of all modern detective novelists. She wrote more than 75 successful novels and many short stories. The performance of Agatha Christie’s play, “The Mousetrap” (1952), set a world record for the longest continuous run at one theater. Many of her works, especially stories featuring Margaret Rutherford as Miss Marple were adapted for film. Agatha Christie died at Wallingford in Oxfordshire, England on January 12, 1976.
Who Is Miss Marple?
Miss Jane Marple was created by Agatha Christie. She is a Victorian lady and a gossip who knows everything that goes on in her hometown of St. Mary Mead. She usually solves her cases by drawing analogies between the behavior of the criminal and the behavior of some person whom she has known from the village. She is supported by her nephew, Raymond West, a best-selling novelist. It is Raymond, and her niece Joyce, a painter, to whom she is telling the story of the murder of Mrs. Rhodes in “Miss Marple Tells a Story.” Miss Marple likes to give the impression that she is a ditherer and tries to hide her intelligence and keen insight into human nature.
“Miss Marple Tells A Story”
Author: Agatha Christie
Agatha Christie’s “Miss Marple Tells A Story,” from the Golden Age of Detective fiction, will be the basis of this unit. It will meet New Haven’s current educational requirement of responding to literature through writing response journals. In addition, it will adapt well as an integrated unit and lend itself to the development of technology skills. The students will adapt the literal, interpretive, and critical thinking skills developed during the study of this detective story and apply these problem solving techniques to their own lives. This story demonstrates that a detective may be of either gender.
Plot summary of “Miss Marple Tells a Story”
In “Miss Marple Tells a Story,” Miss Marple relates the story of the murder of Mrs. Rhodes to her nephew Raymond and niece Joyce. One evening she is visited by Mr. Petherick, her solicitor, and a young man named Mr. Rhodes. Mr. Rhodes’s wife had been stabbed in a hotel in nearby Barnchester and he is under suspicion of having murdered her. They retained Sir Malcolm Olde, K.C. to defend Mr. Rhodes but are not satisfied with his intended line of defense (suicide) so they came to Miss Marple for another opinion. They give her the following facts of what occurred on the night of March 8th. Mr. and Mrs. Rhodes had been staying at the Crown Hotel and occupied adjoining rooms with a connecting door. She retired to bed in her room after dinner, and he was working on a book in the adjoining room. When he checked on his wife he found her lying in bed stabbed through the heart with a stiletto dagger on which there were no fingerprints. She had been dead for an hour or more. The other door in Mrs. Rhodes’s room leads to the corridor through a little hallway with a bathroom, but was locked and bolted on the inside. The only window was closed and latched. Mr. Rhodes said nobody had passed through his room except a chambermaid bringing hot water bottles to his wife.
No one but Mr. Rhodes and the chambermaid, Mary Hill, had entered Mrs. Rhodes’s room. The chambermaid, who is half-witted, brought Mrs. Rhodes the hot water bottle and left. She had no reason to assault the guest.
At the head of the staircase is a lounge where four witnesses having coffee could see down a passage that goes off to the right. The last door (door A) leads to Mr. Rhodes’s room. They said only Mr. Rhodes and the chambermaid used the door. The passage turns to the right again and the first door (door B) around the corner is the door to Mrs. Rhodes’s room. An electrician was working there and he said only the chambermaid entered or left the door.
At the inquest Mr. Rhodes unconvincingly told the story of a woman who had written threatening letters to his wife. As his wife tended to exaggerate, he himself did not believe his wife’s story of a woman who vowed vengeance because Mrs. Rhodes had injured her child in a motor accident before they were married. His wife had received threatening letters which he thought she had composed herself.
Miss Marple asks if there were any women staying at the hotel by themselves and found there were two—Mrs. Granby, an Anglo-Indian widow, and Miss Carruthers, a spinster of about forty who dropped her g’s. There is nothing to connect either of them to the crime.
There are four possibilities. Either Mrs. Rhodes committed suicide, or she was killed either by her husband, the chambermaid, or an outsider whom nobody saw enter or leave.
Miss Marple concludes that the latter and least likely situation is true. She says that the chambermaid came in through door A to Mr. Rhode’s room and passed into his wife’s room with the hot water bottle and went out through the hallway into passage B. The murderess then came by door B into the little hallway and concealed herself in the bathroom and waited until the chambermaid left. She then entered Mrs. Rhodes’s room and killed her and wiped the handle of the stiletto. She then locked and bolted the door by which she entered and left through Mr. Rhodes’s room. Mr. Rhodes was busy and saw only a chambermaid in a uniform and apron and didn’t pay attention to her. It was the same dress but not the same woman. Likewise the people having coffee and the electrician saw the chambermaid but not the woman herself.
Miss Marple decides that the murderer is Miss Carruthers because she dropped her g’s and that is something that no one under sixty does. Therefore Miss Marple knew she was playing a part and overdoing it. Later Miss Carruthers, who was using a false name, confessed to the murder. Mrs. Rhodes had run over her daughter and the woman had gone insane. Thus Miss Marple proves that things are not always what they appear to be.
