Miss Marple Revisited

by Janice Law

A recent bout of Lyme Disease has had me resident on the couch, watching gallery tours or cook shows on YouTube and revisiting the BBC's late 20th century production of all twelve of Agatha Christie's Miss Marple books. The series stars the incomparable Joan Hickson as the third member of the great trio of cerebral detectives.

While the colors of the videos seem to have faded, Hickson, who began work on the series at age 78, is every bit as sharp and plausible as I remembered. While Poirot and Holmes are memorable in part for their well-cultivated eccentricities, Miss Marple is an extraordinary mind in an ordinary frame. 

Miss Marple in harmless mode

Indeed, as she herself points out, an elderly lady, being almost universally regarded as both harmless and inconsequential, is free to ask nosey questions and offer sharp observations. Talk about turning disadvantage to profit!

The combination of half-feigned dithering and razor sharp analysis must have been tricky to pull off in both print and film. I think Hickson succeeds in part because she is one of those fine British actors who does less rather than more. Not for her are histrionics or clever bits of business, not even a striking wardrobe such as both Poirot and Holmes enjoy.

In faded pastels and washed out grays, she looks neat and anonymous, but there is no doubt that she has sharp ears and that her chilly eyes miss nothing. "I don't believe anyone," she remarks at one point, which brings me to something I had half forgotten: how very ruthlessly persistent and coldly rational she is, and also how nasty some of the crimes are that she investigates.

The generation of writers that followed Christie reacted not only against the clever and complicated plots, but also against the settings: the cozy version of the class system, the country houses, charming villages, and genteel sections of London. All to the good, mysteries have become grittier, more diverse, or– in the case of popular series like Midsomer Murders, a parody of the older style.

But revisiting the Hickson Miss Marple series, I was struck not only by the vast social changes since the post World War Two era Christie depicted, but also by the continuities in mystery plots. Some literary changes represent a widening of interest, a greater range of characters and social classes, an increased sexual frankness, but others are simply stylistic, a matter of focus and emphasis.

Take Nemesis, one of the best of the series in my opinion. It's tricky and elaborate all right. A fabulously rich man leaves deathbed instructions leading Miss Marple and her nephew on a bus tour of rural churches and country mansions, a route that will involve them in a decade old murder. 

Nemesis is full of puzzles, and yet at the heart it is a sinister psychological drama with a killer brutal enough to have stepped out of any modern thriller.  In a modern novel, we would undoubtedly open with the first of the killings, a young woman bludgeoned and strangled, while the second would most likely be revisited in a graphic flashback. 

Yesterday or today, the material is the same, only the treatment, sanitized in one form, sensationalized in another, is different. Christie found an ideal character for her contemporary format, an observer and analyst who could make old clues speak, who was acceptable everywhere and noticed nowhere – until it is too late for the perpetrator to escape.

Of course, being a rather frail looking woman in her late seventies, Jane Marple is not going to perform heroics. She rarely has to rumple her cardigan, although when called upon, Hickson comes through gamely. She faces down the killer in Nemesis and actually dispatches the villain in Sleeping Murder. Do not try anything with a keen gardener armed with an insecticide sprayer. 

In general, though, she relies on tolerant, rather dim policemen for her assistance, and here I was struck by a real difference, no doubt based on assumptions about women and class. Modern detective fiction often pits the amateur (and sometimes the professional) sleuth against the powers that be. The overweening chief constable, the obstructive chief of detectives, the dismissive local force are frequent obstacles. 

Miss Marple's interrogative mode

But Miss Marple is tolerated. Naturally she is always right and so contributes to a happy solution, plus she is a lady and must be treated politely. She is also old and female and inconsequential. Her help can be accepted and even acknowledged because she is fundamentally unimportant and only a momentary threat to male egos.  

No wonder she is skeptical and trusts no one without evidence. 

Two Heads Can be Better Than One

Until I read A Wilder Shore, the Romantic Odyssey of Fanny & Robert Louis Stevenson, Camile Peri's excellent dual biography, I hadn't realized the number of Stevenson's literary collaborators or the mixed fortunes of their productions. The stories with Fanny were big sellers: A novel, The Wrong Box, with his stepson Lloyd Osborne, survived to be a 20th century movie; the plays with his needy friend, William Ernest Henley, were failures. None rivaled R. L.'s own best works.

Stevenson's ventures with collaborators got me thinking about successful mystery writing partnerships. Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo helped create enthusiasm for Scandinavian Noir back in the last century. Charles and Caroline Todd, a rare mother and son collaboration, have produced the successful Ian Rutledge series, while Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child have kept Agent Pendergast (fortunately semi-immortal) going though numerous volumes.

To this company, we can now add spouses Collette Lyons and Paul Ulitos, who write as Ellery Lloyd. She is a journalist who studied art history; he has published novels to his credit. Their third venture, The Final Act of Juliette Willoughby, is a cleverly-plotted account of two young art history majors unearthing the life and work of Juliette Willoughby, a long dead surrealist painter who perished in a fire when she was 20. 

Willoughby, and the great 30's surrealist art show that included her work, were suggested topics by their final year dissertation supervisor, Alice Long, an elderly eccentric. She points them toward the Willoughby Bequest, a vast trove of paintings, ephemera, and Egyptian artifacts, and  also toward the Courtauld Institute's Witt Library and Longhurst, the ancestral home of the Willoughbys.  Longhurst and its present inhabitants open up the world of privilege and obsession that spawned the surrealist artist and her one undeniable (but sadly lost) masterpiece.

I hope this little precis of the premise does not make the novel seem dry or academic, because Ellery Lloyd actually throws a lot of traditional favorites into the mix: Osiris, a secret Cambridge society (more Egyptian artifacts); a family scandal, not one, but two, unsolved disappearances; bohemian high jinks in Paris, blackmail threats, and, eventually, murders.

 We also have a high society party, an over-the-top art opening, and interesting information about the surrealist artists. Except for Juliette and her notable lover, Oskar Erlich, the artists are all real art historical figures and one, Leonora Carrington, was clearly an inspiration for Juliette. The real and fictional women share similar backgrounds, mental health issues, a famous self portrait, and the possession of an older and more successful lover.

The structure of The Final Act of Juliette Willoughby is complex but so skillfully done that the story line remains admirably clear. The narrative is shared between Caroline and Patrick, the two students, and the time shifts back and forth between what they know and do in 1991 and in the present time. Their narratives are supplemented by the entries in Juliette's diary, a document which Caroline painstakingly transcribes. 

The result is a an entertaining update of the British country house and high society mystery, with bad behavior among overprivileged aristocrats mingled with modern tech and ultra modern money.  

 

Fashion

"Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose," said Tallyrand, an old pol cynical about progress and change. Still, there's more than a kernel of truth in his observation, which is maybe why at a certain stage, every society seems obsessed by fashion. 

Politics and human nature may resist improvement, but fashion's mysterious currents  provide novelty. William Boyd's new historical spy novel, Gabriel's Moon, got me thinking about literary fashions. However creative or imaginative we are, our work seems inescapably set in our own time and in the style of the moment.

Gabriel's Moon, literate and well done, is in a very British style. Indeed, the plot owes a lot to my own absolute favorite in the genre, Eric Ambler's Journey into Fear, which itself owes big debts to John Buchan.

Even if you have not read Journey into Fear, you will recognize the outline: an innocent civilian, in this case, a well-educated engineer, is pressed into service in a dangerous foreign country.  The little job he is assigned, getting a roll of film back to the UK, does not seem too dangerous, but precautions are taken, and the would-be courier is booked onto an aging freighter with a small group of passengers. 

What could possibly go wrong on this small ship, surely too obscure to have attracted malign notice? Plenty, of course, and our hero soon moves from semi-complacency to a desperate search for friends, to an awareness that he is alone and must rely on his own resources absolutely.

Such a good plot! In Boyd's variant, set not in Amblers pre WW2 but in the early 1960's, Gabriel Dax, successful travel writer, is asked to buy a drawing from a reputable if not exactly famous, Spanish artist. Dax has occasionally done such little favors for his older brother, who is something in the British foreign services. He makes the purchase without trouble and returns home, because this novel is rather more expansive than Ambler's. 

The modern thriller must take time to flesh out its characters and give them back stories and complexities that earlier works indicated with a few well chosen lines. Dax has a history of childhood trauma – a doozy it must be admitted; a florid literary style, and eventually an analyst, one of the more interesting characters in the novel.

He also has a girlfriend, Loretta, who works at a Wimpy Burger and whom he sees as exotic because she's working class. Loretta, in turn, introduces him as her "posh boyfriend" which gives her a certain style and very modern, too. 

There was, to my memory, only one female character in Journey. Dax has not only a girlfriend and a female analyst, but his spy control is Faith Green, a chilly woman whom he rather perversely finds seductive. Both are very much 21st century women, although in 1960-62, the attitudes of male thriller writers skewed traditional.

There are other stylistic differences, too. While Ambler's novel cut straight to the chase, Boyd's has time to consider the mystery of Dax's childhood (the novel is a spy story wrapped around a mystery); the costs of secrecy and deception; and the restraints of the class system. 

He explores the psychology of double agents, a reflection of his fascination with Kim Philby, the notorious British agent, and manages to first extricate Dax and then trap him in a most satisfactory manner, eventually like Ambler's hero, on shipboard. 

Boyd's well done Gabriel's Moon is interesting stylistically because it presents an era that itself provided plenty of spy thrillers. Moon reads convincingly today but the novel's attitudes, timing, and style are resolutely of our time and to our taste, as a glance at any equivalent novel from the early 1960's will show. 

So was Tallyrand wrong? Not entirely. At least in the literary world, some things don't change entirely but morph one way and another in fashionable variations.

****

The Falling Men, a novel with strong mystery elements, has been issued as an ebook on Amazon Kindle. Also on kindle: The Complete Madame Selina Stories.

The Man Who Met the Elf Queen, with two other fanciful short stories and 4 illustrations, is available from Apple Books at:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/the-man-who-met-the-elf-queen/id1072859654?ls=1&mt=11

The Dictator's Double, 3 short mysteries and 4 illustrations is available at: 

https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/the-dictators-double/id1607321864?ls=1&mt=11

Disclaimer

    One of the best movies of the 'Sixties was Rashomon, a beautiful black and white film set in the samurai era by Akira Kurosawa and based on a story by his country man, Ryunosuke Akutagawa. The plot revolves around an assault and murder; a samurai and his wife, traveling through a forest, are attacked by a bandit. When the dust settles, the wife has been raped, the samurai is dead, and the bandit, eventually to be captured, is on the run.

Cate Blachett

    Each of the protagonists presents a radically different view of events, the wife and the bandit in person; the dead samurai, via a trance medium. Unsurprisingly, each story casts the teller in the best possible light, though one commonality is that there is no good ending for the woman in any scenario.

    I thought about Rashomon, seen so long ago, with Disclaimer, the brand new Apple + series by Alfonso Cuaron and based on the Renee Knight novel of the same name. Truth is once again closely related to self interest and self image, but modern society gives far more opportunities for  promoting one's point of view. The samurai, his wife, and the bandit had only their testimony. The characters in Disclaimer have books and websites and photographs and email and messaging.

Kevin Kline

    But as Pontius Pilate asked, What is truth? And how can it be untangled from passion, malice, self interest, shame, hate and guilt? Rashomon took under two hours; Disclaimer takes seven episodes, but both come to similar conclusions, and sad to say, one of them is that societal odds are still stacked against women.

    Just the same, Disclaimer, well cast and quite elegantly photographed, is mostly entertaining with dramatic final episodes. At heart, it is a story of grief becoming toxic and a man finding purpose in revenge after the loss of his son and his wife's depression and eventual death. Played by Kevin Kline, Steven conveys both genuine sorrow and cold, manipulative malice.  

    In this age when print seems old fashioned, it is reassuring for a writer that Steven's chosen instrument of revenge should be a self published novel. But then The Perfect Stranger only needs a handful of readers, beginning with Catherine (Cate Blanchette) the woman he blames for his son's drowning. And though the novel begins with the usual disclaimer that the work is fiction and any resemblance to persons living or dead is coincidence, in this case, Steven doesn't mean a word of it.

Leslie Manville

    No, The Perfect Stranger is the absolute truth about a long ago holiday in Italy, and if Catherine or her husband (Sasha Baron Cohen) or son (Kodi Smit-McPhee) have any doubts, well here are some photos to back up the story. And here is an Instagram website purportedly belonging to the long dead Jonathan (Louis Partridge) with more pictures and lots of troll bait. 

    The Perfect Stranger, actually composed by Steven's wife (well played by Leslie Manville), is a genuinely good read. Plus, Steven seems diffident, vulnerable, earnest, and compassionate, even when the viewer already knows his game.

    The structure of the series helps to make him convincing. Contemporary events are intercut with scenes from that long ago Italian summer. These, while absolutely essential to the working out of the plot, are the weakest episodes in the series, with various wrong notes smoothed over by erotic scenes reminiscent of the men's magazines of the last century.

Louis Partridge

    These glimpses of the past certainly could be shorter, but they serve a clever purpose, and viewers who persist will be rewarded with a gripping finale. And some questions, too. With all our tech, are we any closer to accurate knowledge of events than the ill fated trio in Rashomon? Or are we, in fact, more vulnerable to lies, ever rushing to find truth and quick to endorse – and spread ever more exaggerated opinions? Nervous, on the one hand, lest we offend the proprieties of the moment, and on the other going to extremes when we are convinced we are right? 

    Disclaimer is a slick and sometimes manipulative thriller that raises some of the real questions of the moment.

Victim Statement

Victim statements, a presentation of the impact of a crime during a judicial proceeding, became common here late in the 20th century, although other cultures have had similar and earlier versions. One of the more flamboyant examples in art occurs in the latter stages of the trial in Rashomon, the great Kurosawa film about the murder of a traveler and the rape of his wife. 

Unable to determine whether the truth lies with the accused or the wife, the court enlists a medium to question the spirit of the dead man. Unsurprisingly, the ghost's version of a victim statement is also biased, yet this is fair enough, given that the other two have presented their own self-serving narratives.

I began thinking about victim statements while reading Tommy Orange's Wandering Stars. It has some of the same characters as his highly praised There There, but ranges back in time to the later stages of the Indian Wars and the remote ancestors of characters like Lony and Orvid Red Feather.

 The novel begins with the ghastly massacre at Sand Creek, November 1864, when members of the Third Colorado Cavalry under Colonel John Chivington attacked a Cheyenne and Arapahoe village, killing and mutilating anywhere from a couple of hundred to as many as 600 people, mostly women and children.

The attack was so egregious that several of Chivington's officers had refused to participate, and one testified later at a Congressional hearing highly critical of the Colonel. None of this, however, changed the situation on the Plains. Treaties continued to be made and broken, the buffalo, and even native ponies, continued to be slaughtered, and Cheyenne and Arapahoe land continued to shrink.

Were the plains tribes then doomed to utter extinction by government policy? Not quite. There was an alternative that two of the Wandering Stars Sand Creek survivors wind up experiencing. Taken into US military custody and imprisoned in an old fort in Florida, they undergo the regimen of English language education, military drill, and Christianization that would later be the pattern for the now notorious Indian Schools. 

Their new non-Native names are Jude Star and Victor Bear Shield. They are the male progenitors of the subsequent characters, and as Orange is neither an historian nor a lawyer, their victim statement is in the form of a novel, made up of their stories and the testimony of their descendants, male and female, right down to the twenty-teens.

Orange is an excellent writer, and many of the short narratives are gripping, particularly the historic accounts that will be new to many readers. What is striking is that it is not the brutal events (and Star and Bear Shield see and experience a lot) that cause their families the worst  damage but rather the cultural losses. Besides the near extermination of the buffalo, the key animal in the whole plains ecology and in the Cheyenne economy, these included the loss of ancestral languages, religion, art, diet, even clothing and hairstyles.

The re-education program that intended to "kill the Indian, save the man" was in some ways more devastating that any battle, because it took away identity and substituted something coerced, something the descendants know is not authentic.  Characters like Opal Viola Bear Shield and Orvil and Jacquie Red Feather know that they are missing something vital, and without even the residue of the old ways that sustain Jude Star and Victor Bear Shield, they fill up the void with alcohol and drugs. 

Tommy Orange

The later sections of the novel deal with their struggles with addiction, and more interestingly, how they begin to piece together the remnants of the old culture and adapt what in contemporary society can be useful and meaningful. This is not an easy task. For some, while even the identity of their original tribe is lost, they still remain "other" in the society. Yet they persist. Wandering Stars serves not just as a literary victim statement, but as a testament to survival.

 

A Prince of Detection

I made the acquaintance of a Prince last week. This was somewhat belated, as Florizel, Prince of Bohemia, had made his London Magazine debut in 1878. Later, seeing his stories plagiarized, Robert Louis Stevenson collected the four stories comprising "The Suicide Club" in the hardback New Arabian Nights.

His Highness is a lively character who forms an interesting comparison to his near contemporary Sherlock Holmes, who appears in 1887. Both inhabit similar, mostly masculine, worlds, have a good-hearted companion, and confront a criminal mastermind.

The Prince lives in London. Despite his marked affection for his homeland, Florizel prefers to reside in the British capitol where he collects interesting experiences and usual characters alongside his Master of Horse, Colonel Geraldine.

In this set up, the Colonel, though younger than the prince and very much the faithful subordinate, is easily the more prudent and sensible of the pair. Indeed, Florizel's adventures would have ended with his initial outing, "Story of the Young Man with the Cream Tarts", if Geraldine had not, for once, taken matters into his own hand.

Do not, by the way, be deceived by the cozy suggestions of this title. As in the later adventures of Sherlock Holmes, the whimsical and trivial is often reveals some deep and sinister matter. In this case, 'cream tarts' lead direct to the Suicide Club, which, starting with film rights in 1909, has showed up on film, on stage, on TV, and as recently as 2017 in a Caliber Comic.

The Colonel plays a big role in this story, not so in most of the others. Unlike Watson, that most famous of detective companions, Geraldine does not narrate the stories. Rather, his function is to offer good advice and reminders of the political responsibilities of a prince. These Florizel usually ignores, pulling rank and so precipitating the complications that inspire a good story.

Although an intelligent, socially astute, generous, and gentlemanly character, Florizel is young and very far from the coolly analytical Holmes, who was destined not only for monstrous popularity but for a long life post-Doyle, acquiring not only new authors but a wife and child as well.

By contrast Florizel inspired seven stories in New Arabian Nights, all good. In them he is perhaps as much fixer, if that term is not insulting to a royal personage, as investigator. And unlike Holmes, he is not onstage the majority of the time. Indeed, he sometimes appears only toward the end of the narrative to sort matters out.

Florizel is less a sleuth than a collector of interesting people. If they prove to be in difficult straits, he tries to tip the scales toward the good. He is generous with his help but very much the entitled royal when facing the criminal element.

Throughout, Florizel is brave and capable, a man of the world with an admirable sense of humor, a bit of a philosopher, and fond, like Sherlock, of disguises. Since Stevenson was a fine writer, a master of atmosphere, characterization, and plot, and always very much in need of money, the Prince would seem to have been a good candidate for many more stories. Might he also have become a great detective?

Stevenson did bring him back in More New Arabian Nights, written with his wife, Fanny Van De Grift Stevenson, but by this time, Florizel has lost his kingdom after too much time away from Bohemia. He is now running the finest tobacconist shop in London and clearly does not have the resources and agency he enjoyed as prince.

Perhaps the seriously ill Stevenson ran out of energy for Florizel; perhaps the prince's station and character proved limitations, or perhaps Stevenson simply decided to keep him part of an ensemble rather than the star of the show. In any case, Florizel's fame, if lasting, if modest, and, having settled him comfortably as a merchant in his beloved London, Stevenson spared himself the artistic conflicts that so bedeviled his fellow writer, Conan Doyle, who eventually could not rid himself of his greatest creation.

And here, a Stevenson type of story suggests itself: an astute author who spies Conan Doyle's error in sending Holmes over the falls but failing to produce a body. A character can return from the dead, it seems, but not from becoming a tobacconist in London.

---

The Fallible Detective

We are in an age of superlatives, fond of the latest and greatest, enamored of super heroes and extraordinary feats. Detective fiction is not immune to these desires, which is perhaps why Holmes, Poirot, and Miss Marple, the three infallible, never to be corrected sleuths, are still crowding the shelves and showing up on screens big and small.

I'm personally very fond of them, but lately I have come to a renewed appreciation of the fallible detective. Not the comic type like Inspector Clouseau, but the competent, hardworking investigator who makes the occasional mistake and who owns up to error, like St. John Strafford.

Strafford, John Banville's detective, is a bit of an odd duck, being a Protestant police officer in very Catholic 1950's Dublin. A member of the Protestant Ascendancy, a fancy term for the descendants of the English colonization project that began in the 12th century, Strafford is a privileged and well educated member of the elite country house set. He is intelligent, quiet, a bit socially awkward, and almost terminally reserved.

Both saddened and relieved by the end of his marriage, Strafford admits he doesn't understand women, an insight that fails to keep him from unwise entanglements. Just the same, Under his cool courtesy, he has considerable sympathy as well as a strong desire to do the ethical thing. This is just as well because unlike some fictional detectives he is not infallible.

John Banville

Strafford's qualities are on display in The Drowned, the newest of Banville's Strafford and Quirke series, the latter being a pathologist who conducts post mortems for the Dublin police. Quirke and Strafford are on uneasy terms, being unlike in nearly everything but a concern for careful work and crime solving. The fact that Stafford is currently seeing Quirke's daughter Phoebe has not helped their relations, either.

The two of them were last seen in The Lock-Up, and one of the interesting things Banville does in the current novel is to shed not only light but doubt on the earlier case. It is an interesting strategy for a novelist and one that raises questions for his detectives.

The 1950's really were a different century as far as forensics goes. Cell phones with their useful location functions, advanced DNA testing, and CCTV footage are tools way beyond what even the best funded copper had in the '50's. Detectives in period novels like The Drowned must rely on interviews, observation, and knowledge of human nature.

This perhaps is what makes a good detective like Strafford a little more cautious, a little more careful, a little less certain that he's on the right track. Or perhaps a certain humility is just part of his character. Another cop on the case has no doubts whatsoever and backs his hunches up with a frequent resource to the third degree.

Indeed, at the end of The Drowned, it appears that the higher powers are about to make a serious mistake, one Strafford sees all too clearly. Is Banville setting up for another novel with yet another course correction? It would certainly be a different strategy and one that his intelligent, humane, and self-doubting detective would be ideal to handle.