The Social Creation Of The Female Detective: Miss Marple

In a historical period of depression and world conflict, a writer emerged to help bring order and escapism to a dazed English audience. Agatha Christie, or The Queen of Crime, published her first book in 1920, which introduced her most well known character Hercule Poirot. After seeing some success, she presented another character, one who would become her all time favorite, Miss Jane Marple in 'The Tuesday Night Club'. Agatha Christie stylized Miss Marple after Anna Katharine Green's Amelia Butterworth in that her heroine was an elderly woman with a natural talent for amateur detective work. Through examination of the TV series Miss Marple, played by Joan Hickson, it can be seen that the choices Agatha Christie made about Miss Marple's personality and characteristics of detection are affected by the time period and social landscape in which she was created.

As one of the first female detectives, Miss Marple had large shoes to fill from her male counterparts. When first created, she was described as a "sixty-five year old woman who was caught in the fashions and manners of the turn of the century" (Irons and Warthling Roberts 64). As time went on though, she became less like an elderly woman at the end of her life, but rather a woman who had reached a wise age where she was used for her endless knowledge. In 'The Mirror Crack'd From Side to Side', metaphors to describe her include "as sharp as a knife" and that she has a "mind like a meat cleaver", and with this view of her, she gets a younger look being more like a country-tweedy fashioned woman, notably wealthy and gentile, with a bounce in her step (Irons and Warthling Roberts 66). Through the use of 'The Mirror Crack'd, Miss Marple is show not as a fluffy, grouchy old woman, but rather a highly astute, observant person, who is a spinster, but a very social one at that. She can also be seen as bumbling or eccentric, and often times very gossipy, which is a mark of the woman's spin on being a detective, and she isn't overly nice, and can be seen as a little blunt or brutal, but this is how she has to be in order to be taken seriously by the surrounding male authoritative figures. Agatha Christie's dislike of the narcissistic, heroic male figure (Knight 107-09) creates a character that seems to hide behind the stereotypical spinster role so that she can fly under the radar in a sense and go undetected to solve the crimes. The reader or viewer knows that most will write Miss Marple off as "useless or pesky" (Irons and Warthling Roberts 66) which only enables the characteristics which have been stated. In the episode 'Nemesis', a fellow male character is describing Miss Marple to another and sums up the general persona of her character, "She is a bloodhound, an avenging angel. She looks so harmless, her camouflage is perfect because she is partly what she seems, a gossipy old village lady, but her logic is ruthless and her powers of synthesis formidable, and above all, she never let's go" ("Nemesis").

Agatha Christie began writing the character of Miss Marple in The Golden Age of Detective Fiction, where she wrote her stories with a clue-puzzle structure which implied the novel could be likened to a game in which the reader plays along (Knight 107). Ronald Knox, a fellow Golden Age crime writer, came up with a set of rules, or commandments by which all pieces in this genre were to adhere and Miss Marple was no exception. Knox said, "The detective must have as their main interest the unraveling of a mystery; a mystery whose elements are clearly presented to the reader at an early stage in the proceedings, and whose nature is such as to arouse curiosity, a curiosity which is gratified at the end" ("Golden Age of Detective Fiction"). In all of the Marple stories, Jane seems to always be in the right place at the right time, this is the result of living in a small countryside village. The detective properties she employs include keen observation, intent listening tactics, and staggering analysis of her surroundings. In places where the outsider male detective might dismiss town gossip or chit-chat, Miss Marple grabs hold and uses her past experiences to find significance in the minutest details. In 'Murder in the Vicarage', the inspector brought in to solve the murder of a colonel describes Miss Marple as, "A nasty little gray-haired cobra who sticks to this sort of business (murder) like gum to a cat", and that she, "has a talent for gossip and blind guesswork" ("Murder in the Vicarage"). In a later confrontation between the two, Miss Marple employs the advice, "one can learn a great deal by listening", which is how she eventually finds the two culprits of the crime by reading