A long review, but with no spoilers! That’s how much is going on in this book!
This is about my third time to read this book. The first instance was many, many years ago, when I knew very little about life or about postwar England. At that time, the characters, their life circumstances, their personalities didn’t give me clues about the mystery, but rather were just another part of the exotic setting through which I stumbled, gaping and blinking.
I remember that I reread the book at least once in the interim, but I can’t remember the occasion. Probably I was so busy immersing myself to escape the stresses of everyday life that I didn’t absorb much except “how fun to read an Agatha Christie book.”
And then there’s this trip round. Third time’s the charm?
Lock Up Your Daughters Christies!
I bought this book in response to the news that Christie’s books are now going to be edited before they are published. New editions will remove language that could be hurtful, such as references to class, race, nationality, or people’s personal appearance. In other words, all the distinctive parts of the British world-view in the 30s through 60s that make the books interesting period pieces, that Christie often conveys subtly and sympathetically, and that often figure as important factors in the psychology of the murder mysteries. When I heard this news, my immediate thought was that I’d better build up my own library of older editions of Christie. Her whole corpus has always been widely and cheaply available in libraries and bookstores, but precisely because of this availability, it never occurred to me to build up a collection. I purchased A Murder Is Announced and then at once had occasion to lend it to a young person who had never heard about Christie, so that was my good deed for the month I guess. She finished it in a night or two, and when I got it back I of course re-read it.
It’s not hard to see, in this book, what parts would go on the sensitivity editor’s chopping-block.
Through the door surged a tempestuous young woman with a well-developed bosom heaving under a tight jersey. She had on a dirdl skirt of a bright colour and had greasy dark plaits wound round and round her head. Her eyes were dark and flashing.
She said gustily:
“I can speak to you, yes, please, no?”
Miss Blacklock sighed.
“Of course, Mitzi, what is it?”
ibid, p. 21
Sometimes she thought it would be preferable to do the entire work of the house as well as the cooking rather than be bothered with the eternal nerve storms of her refugee “lady help.”
Wow! Just look at that English stereotype of a foreigner. Mitzi wears bright colors, her hair is “greasy,” she is too curvy (body shaming!), and she is subject to “nerve storms.” Later in the story, we learn that Mitzi is dramatic, boastful, and “a liar.” What could be worse? Surely the sensitivity editor should get rid of this entire character. Unfortunately, Mitzi is rather important to the plot. She also embodies one of the themes in this book: the new conditions of life in the British countryside immediately after WWII.
Post-War Britain
“Helps to find out if people are who they say they are,” said Miss Marple.
She went on:
“Because that’s what’s worrying you, isn’t it? And that’s really the particular way the world has changed since the war. Take this place, Chipping Cleghorn, for instance. It’s very much like St. Mary Mead where I live. Fifteen years ago one knew who everybody was. … They were people whose fathers and mothers and grandfathers and grandmothers, or whose aunts and uncles, had lived there before them. If somebody new came to live there, they brought letters of introduction, or they’d been in the same regiment or served in the same ship as someone there already. If anybody new–really new–really a stranger–came, well, they stuck out–everybody wondered about them and didn’t rest till they found out.”
She nodded her head gently.
“But it’s not like that anymore. Every village and small country place is full of people who’ve just come and settled there without any ties to bring them. The big houses have been sold, and the cottages have been converted and changed. And people just come–and all you know about them is what they say of themselves. They’ve come, you see, from all over the world. People from India and Hong Kong and China, and people who used to live in France and Italy in cheap little places and odd islands. And people who’ve made a little money and can afford to retire. But nobody knows any more who anyone is. People take you at your own valuation. They don’t wait to call until they’ve had a letter from a friend saying that So-and-So’s are delightful people and she’s known them all their lives.”
And that, thought Craddock, was exactly what was oppressing him. He didn’t know. They were just faces and personalities and they were backed up by ration books and identity cards–nice neat identity cards with numbers on them, without photographs or fingerprints. Anybody who took the trouble could have a suitable identity card–and partly because of that, the subtler links that had held together English social rural life had fallen apart. In a town nobody expected to know his neighbor. In the country now nobody knew his neighbor either, though possibly he still thought he did …
ibid, pp. 126 – 127
The postwar conditions that Miss Marple is describing are pretty much what it’s like everywhere in America … at least, everywhere that I have lived. The idea that you might not visit someone, or get to know them, until you’ve had a letter of introduction from someone you do know, strikes an American as stifling. (In Indonesia, by the way, when you come to visit a new place you need a letter of introduction not from a mutual friend but from some kind of bureaucrat.)
Many of these “people” from overseas that Miss Marple describes would have been Englishmen and Englishwomen who had been living abroad before the war. One such person is Miss Blacklock, a main character in this mystery, who came to Chipping Cleghorn only two years ago. Her friend, Dora, and her niece and nephew, Julia and Patrick, who live with her, also came recently. But many others would have been not English but foreigners. Apparently, England had to digest a large influx of postwar refugees and this fact forms the background to many of Christie’s stories, this one in particular. Besides Mitzi, another character is a young Swiss man who works at a nearby hotel and who might not be entirely honest with money.
Christie is not entirely unsympathetic to foreigners. One of her sleuths, Hercule Poirot, is Belgian. English people tend not to take him seriously because he is a “dapper little man with an egg-shaped head” and a French accent, and this tendency to underestimate him often works in Poirot’s favor, just as the fact of her being an unprepossessing old maid works in Miss Marple’s. For example, here is a passage from another of Christie’s books:
Fortunately this queer little foreigner did not seem to know much English. Quite often he did not understand what you said to him, and when everyone was speaking more or less at once he seemed completely at sea. He appeared interested only in refugees and post war conditions, and his vocabulary only included those subjects. Ordinary chitchat appeared to bewilder him. More or less forgotten by all, Hercule Poirot leant back in his chair, sipped his coffee and observed, as a cat may observe, the twitterings, and comings and goings of a flock of birds. The cat is not yet ready to make its spring.
Funerals Are Fatal, pp. 167 – 168
In A Murder Is Announced, English characters make frequent references to the possibility that they themselves, or others, might be unjustly prejudiced against foreigners. And we get passages like this one:
“Please don’t be too prejudiced against the poor thing because she’s a liar. I do really believe that, like so many liars, there is a real substratum of truth behind her lies. I think that though, to take an instance, her atrocity stories have grown and grown until every kind of unpleasant story that has ever appeared in print has happened to her or her relations personally, she did have a bad shock initially and did see one, at least, of her relations killed. I think a lot of these displaced persons feel, perhaps justly, that their claim to our notice and sympathy lies in their atrocity value and so they exaggerate and invent.”
She added, “Quite frankly, Mitzi a maddening person. She exasperates and infuriates us all, she is suspicious and sulky, is perpetually having ‘feelings’ and thinking herself insulted. But in spite of it all, I really am sorry for her.” She smiled. “And also, when she wants to, she can cook very nicely.”
ibid, pp. 59 – 60
This is a really interesting speech. One the hand, it represents Miss Blacklock (and, presumably, Agatha Christie) trying to be fair to Mitzi. On the other hand, from my perspective it still doesn’t give Mitzi enough credit. Any European refugee from WWII was quite likely to have actually lost their entire family, and to have seen and suffered many real atrocities which would sound unbelievable if they were not documented. It was one of the most harrowing periods in modern history. Such people were likely to have severe PTSD which would, in fact, make them “suspicious” and jumpy. For example, when Mitzi is being interviewed by the police in the wake of the murder, she predicts that they will torture her and take her away to a concentration camp. There is no reason to think this is melodrama.
Other parts of Mitzi’s character, such as her boastfulness, emotionalism and tendency to get insulted, may be cultural differences that have nothing to do with the war. Nearly every culture is boastful and demonstrative compared to the Brits, and people tend to get insulted and sulky in shame-based cultures such as we find in Asia (and perhaps some parts of Eastern Europe).
Another aspect of postwar Britain is the increase in bureaucracy. Identity cards have already been mentioned–a sort of top-down attempt to keep track of people bureaucratically now that the older system of everybody knowing everybody has disintegrated–but there is also bureaucratic control of all aspects of the economy, even down to whether people barter:
Craddock said, “He was quite straightforward about being there, though. Not like Miss Hinchcliffe.”
Miss Marple coughed gently. “You must make allowances for the times we live in, Inspector,” she said.
Craddock looked at her, uncomprehendingly.
“After all,” said Miss Marple, “you are the Police, aren’t you? People can’t say everything they’d like to say to the Police, can they?”
“I don’t see why not,” said Craddock. “Unless they’ve got some criminal matter to conceal.”
“She means butter,” said Bunch. “Thursday is the day one of the farms round here makes butter. They let anybody they like have a bit. It’s usually Miss Hinchcliffe who collects it. But it’s all a bit hush hush, you know, a kind of local scheme of barter. One person gets butter, and sends along cucumbers, or something like that–and a little something when a pig’s killed. And now and then an animal has an accident and has to be destroyed. Oh, you know the sort of thing. Only one can’t, very well, say it right out to the Police. Because I suppose quite a lot of this barter is illegal–only nobody really knows because it’s all so complicated.”
ibid, pp. 214 – 215
I didn’t even notice this aspect of the book during the previous times I read it. This time, it jumped out at me, because somewhere I had seen an essay about how in the postwar years, England continued rationing as a sort of experiment in socialism and this kept people poor for longer than they otherwise would have been. C.S. Lewis, for example, like many in England, relied on care packages from friends in America for such things as ham. Having been sensitized to this aspect of it, on this go-round I realized how much this Christie book really is a time capsule.
And … “nobody really knows because it’s all so complicated” is truly the essence of bureaucracy!
The Fun of Being a Woman
But the Christie goodness doesn’t stop there. (Really, there is so much going on in this book!) There is the delightful Mrs. Goedler. She is actually a very minor character … the widow of Miss Blacklock’s financier employer. Miss Blacklock stands to inherit if Mrs. Goedler predeceases her, which is very likely to happen because Mrs. Goedler has had poor health for years and is now likely to die within a few weeks. Inspector Craddock visits her, and Mrs. Goedler has this to say:
“Why, exactly, did your husband leave his money the way he did?”
“You mean, why did he leave it to Blackie? Not for the reason you’ve probably been thinking.” Her roguish twinkle was very apparent. “What minds you policemen have! Randall was never in the least in love with her and she wasn’t with him. Letitia, you know, has really got a man’s mind. She hasn’t any feminine feelings or weaknesses. I don’t believe she was ever in love with any man. She was never particularly pretty and she didn’t care for clothes. She used a little makeup in deference to prevailing custom, but not to make herself look prettier.” There was pity in the old voice as she went on: “She never knew any of the fun of being a woman.”
Craddock looked at the frail little figure in the big bed with interest. Belle Goedler, he realized, had enjoyed–still enjoyed–being a woman. She twinkled at him.
“I’ve always thought,” she said, “it must be terribly dull to be a man.”
ibid, p. 169
Now, that’s awfully inspiring to a gal like me. But Belle Goedler is not finished giving us advice on how to live:
She nodded her head at him.
“I know what you’re thinking. But I’ve had all the things that make life worth while–they may have been taken from me–but I have had them. I was pretty and gay as a girl, I married the man I loved, and he never stopped loving me … My child died, but I had him for two precious years … I’ve had a lot of physical pain–but if you have pain, you know how to enjoy the exquisite pleasure of the times when pain stops. And everyone’s been kind to me, always … I’m a lucky woman, really.”
ibid, p. 171
Go and do likewise.
Out of Babel Books 