Not so cosy: A podcast on Agatha Christie's The Mousetrap

I came across a new podcast today – Garlic & Pearls – via a really good episode on Agatha Christie's play The Mousetrap.

It's thoroughly researched and emphasises how far from cosy Christie's works can be. The Mousetrap is set in a dislocated postwar world in which the class structure has been shaken and there is an air of paranoid watchfulness.

The BBC's adaptations of the Miss Marple books, which starred the incomparable Joan Hickson, were set firmly in this world. And it's noticeable that when Bertram's Hotel appears to have survived the changes unscathed, it turns out to be too good to be true.

Meanwhile, after the Colonel died, Dolly Bantry sold the big house and moved very happily into a modernised lodge house with all the latest conveniences. The future need not always be resisted, as the worldly Marple grasps.

I recently wrote an article for Central Bylines about the 12-year-old foster child called Dennis O'Neill whose death on a farm in Shropshire Christie to write the play.

Agatha Christie on Hercule Poirot: "Would anyone go and consult him? One feels not"

John Lanchester once wrote a good essay for the London Review of Books on Agatha Christie, emphasising that the most interesting thing about her is the way she plays with every convention of the detective novel:

The self-conscious, formalist impulse behind Christie’s work is the explanation for one of the biggest puzzles about her books: why the most popular detective writer of all time had as her principal character a man who is, by general agreement, the worst detective of all. 

By "worst" I mean least likeable, most implausible, most annoying, vainest, and the one whose characterisation is most dependent on whimsical details that add nothing in terms of psychological insight: in other words, Poirot. (By "whimsical details" I mean all that guff about hot chocolate and moustaches and "the little grey cells".) 

Detectives are often – one might go so far as to say are usually – annoying and implausible, but nobody is more so than Poirot, as Christie herself acknowledged. "Would anyone go and 'consult; him?" she wondered aloud. "One feels not." He was, she said, "regarded perhaps with more affection by outsiders than by his own creator". 

Her advice to writers starting out on a career in detective fiction was: "Be very careful what central character you create – you may have him with you for a very long time!"

In that same essay, Christie put her finger on something which has long been apparent to her readers, that Miss Marple, in her creator’s words "an elderly, gossipy lady in a small village, who pokes her nose into all that does or does not concern her, and draws deductions based on years of experience of human nature", is fundamentally believable in a fashion that her other great detective isn’t.

And yet there are only 12 Marple novels and 20 short stories, versus Poirot’s total of 33 novels, 51 stories and a play.

Christie is often dismissed as "cosy", but it seems to me that Miss Marple, with her belief that you can understand every variety of human evil by studying everyday life in an English village, is one of the least cosy figures in our literature.

Is Kind Hearts and Coronets the only nasty Ealing comedy?

Reading a recent London Review of Books, I came across Ruby Hamilton's review of three books by Celia Dale:

The appeal of Dale’s writing is clearly the same fetishisation* of English nastiness that bolstered the interwar 'golden age' of crime writing, ruled over by Dorothy L. Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, Margery Allingham and Agatha Christie, or the postwar Ealing comedies, best represented by Dennis Price in Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949): "It is so difficult to make a neat job of killing people with whom one is not on friendly terms."

I like Hamilton's take on the those women crime writers. There is rarely anything cosy about them - least of all about Agatha Christie's Miss Marple books, predicated as they are on the theory that you can learn about every form of human depravity simply by observing life in an English village.

But Kind Hearts and Coronets is not a typical Ealing comedy, even if it's the best of them. Because there is little nastiness in these films: the criminals in The Lavender Hill Mob have our sympathy, while those in The Ladykillers are rendered harmless by their incompetence.

What the films tend to celebrate is the common good and its triumphs over individual ambition. This is seen at its clearest in Davy, a failed star vehicle for Harry Secombe, which is the last and probably the worse Ealing Comedy. In it, Secombe gives up his dream of an opera career to remain with his family's struggling variety act.

But then dreams of escape tended to come to nothing at Ealing, whether Alec Guinness's in The Lavender Hill Mob or those of a whole London district in Passport to Pimlico.

So I don't find the nastiness that Ruby Hamilton says she finds in the Ealing comedies. Am I missing something?

* 'Fetishising' would save one syllable and the rarer 'fetishing' would save two.

Kingsthorpe: Where Northampton has almost won

Pitsford surprised me. Boughton astounded me. But by the time you get to Kingsthorpe the encroachment of Northampton is almost complete.

The old village is still there amongst it all. So you get a road with an ironstone farmhouse on one side and Victorian terraces on the other. A village green bordered by mid-20th-century bungalows. Rural enclaves with 21st-century infill at the end of them.

And, says Wikipedia, it is something of a nursery for actors. Joan Hickson, Judy Carne and Lesley Joseph all lived here as girls.

I wonder if St Mary Mead is now like this?

Joan Hickson was the greatest Miss Marple

I have said it before and I am going to say it again here: Joan Hickson was the greatest Miss Marple.

And if you won't take my word for it, listen to Natalie Haynes writing on a Guardian blog a couple of years ago:

Hickson captured perfectly the fluffy ruthlessness of Jane Marple: she has wispy white hair like the mohair she's so often knitting with her softly clicking pins; the slight thickening of the voice when she's thinking; the real sense that she is, as Sir Henry Clithering describes her, "one of the most formidable criminologists in England. There she sits, an elderly spinster, sweet, placid, so you'd think. Yet her mind has plumbed the depths of human iniquity, and taken it all in the day's work". 

Hickson's Marple is neither Rutherford's buffoon nor McEwan's camp schoolmarm: she is a frail elderly woman who is simply unshockable and fearless. Jason Rafiel (Donald Pleasence) has her number: "She also has a mind like a bacon slicer." He is the one who nicknames her Nemesis, the goddess of retribution, in A Caribbean Mystery. And it is the measure of a good policeman that he can recognise her brilliance in spite of her old-lady mannerisms: Chief Inspector Fred Davy (the much-missed George Baker in At Bertram's Hotel) gets her immediately, whereas poor Chief Inspector Slack (David Horovitch in The Body in the Library) is a less good judge of character. 

Miss Marple's great gift is to have seen every facet of human behaviour in her village, St Mary Mead. Every new person, situation and crime is filtered through this knowledge: she is never surprised by anything. "Apparently, he's a … communist," whispers the vicar's wife of Edmund Swettenham in A Murder is Announced. "Well, yes," replies Miss Marple, thoughtfully. "Then he must be very lonely in Chipping Cleghorn."

Haynes also reminds us that the first episode of The Body in the Library (Hickson's first Miss Marple) was screened on Boxing Day, two days after the the final episode of The Box of Delights was shown.

They really don't make Christmas television like that any more.

Horton's Guide to Britain's Railways in Feature Films

This book, purchased on my recent visit to the Great Central Railway in Loughborough, has revolutionised my appreciation of films.

Take my last two discs from LoveFilm.

Thanks to Horton, I knew that Murder She Said - Margaret Rutherford's first outing as Miss Marple, which is treated as a social comedy as much as a murder mystery - would feature all sorts of footage of steam trains. Hardly surprising, as it is an adaptation of Agatha Christie's 4.50 from Paddington.

But most interesting of all:

NB D600-type "Warship" diesel No D603 passes on an express - medium shot. This is the best shot in the film and so far the only known appearance of one of these short-lived diesels in a feature film.

And I have also watched The Innocents, Jack Clayton's superlative adaptation of Henry James' ghost story The Turn of the Screw. Thanks to Christopher Freeling's commentary, I know that this film was influenced by Benjamin Britten's opera - John Piper did designs for both works.

But it is from Horton I learn that the film

Includes a nice shot of a train arriving at Horsted Keynes station on the Bluebell Railway with SR "birdcage" coaches but no loco (out of shot). This is believed to be the first occasion when a feature film was shot on the Bluebell, or indeed on any standard gauge preserved line.

Magnificent stuff. Now to watch Blow-Up and look for the "green SR two-car suburban EMU" that features near the beginning.

Pauline Prescott and Miss Marple in Bournemouth

Walking up the hill past the Bournemouth International Centre to the Highcliffe after appearing in the Liberal Revue last night, I was reminded of a couple of incidents from the history of that short, steep stretch of road.

In 1999 John Prescott was driven down it. When it was suggested this wasn't a very environmentally friendly thing to do and he should have walked instead, his defence was that he had taken the limo:

"Because of the security reasons for one thing and, second, my wife doesn't like to have her hair blown about."

And if you watch The Body in the Library, the first of the Miss Marple adaptations starring Joan Hickson, you will see that the Highcliffe and the road past it feature prominently.

The Body in the Library was shown at Christmas 1984, so was presumably filmed that summer. I attended my first Liberal Assembly at Bournemouth in the September of that year, so it is nice to have a record of how it looked in those days (if you ignore the extras in 1940s clothes).

That Liberal Assembly took place at the old Winter Gardens. The Bournemouth International Centre had just been built and the Liberal Party had been offered the chance to be the first organisation to hold an event there.

But the conference organisers thought, despite the offer of a juicy discount, it would not be a good idea for the party to act as guinea pigs and discover all the problems with the centre.

Geraldine McEwan is no longer Miss Marple

But then, as far as I am concerned, she never was. Joan Hickson will always be Miss Marple.

The Guardian reports the story thus:

The hunt is on for a new Miss Marple after actress Geraldine McEwan announced her retirement from the role today.

McEwan has played Agatha Christie's heroine sleuth Jane Marple since ITV1 brought her back in 2003 and starred in the role in 12 TV films. 

ITV and Marple rights owner Chorion will begin the process of finding a new Miss Marple next week. 

Candidates for McEwan's replacement are thought to include Victoria Wood, Julie Walters, Prunella Scales, Anna Massey and Eileen Atkins.

My vote would be for Prunella Scales - who made a more convincing Queen Victoria than Judi Dench did - and above all not for Victoria Wood or Julie Walters, much as I admire the former at least.

Returning to the McEwan vs Hickson question, let me quote something I wrote a couple of years ago:

I have been trying to work out why I believe Joan Hickson was a much better Miss Marple than Geraldine McEwan. 

In part it is the two performances. McEwan is visibly acting the whole time - all those little smiles and grimaces - whereas Hickson hardly seemed to be acting at all. Outwardly she was all stillness, yet she managed to convey the underlying intelligence and the core of moral steel which brought murderers to justice. 

And in part it is the people around them. With some of them now over 20 years old, the Hickson Miss Marples are beginning to look like a late manifestation of the mid-century Britain in which they were set. Such figures as Joan Greenwood and George Baker appear in the cast list; one of the films was even directed by Roy Boulting. 

McEwan, by contrast, has to put up with the company of people like Dawn French and Harry Enfield. It's a prejudice of mine, but was there ever a more self-regarding and overrated generation than that which came to prominence in the 1980s? And even if you like these figures, their profile is such that they are always bigger than the characters they play.

That last point explains why I would not like to see Victoria Wood or Julie Walters playing Miss Marple. But they could perhaps play that underexploited Christie character Ariadne Oliver.

Woolmer murder: Jamaican police call in help

"While on vacation at a resort hotel in the West Indies, Miss Marple correctly suspects that the apparently natural death of a retired British major is actually the work of a murderer planning yet another killing."

For my tribute to Bob Woolmer click here. For more on Miss Marple click there.

Matthew Taylor and Miss Marple

Earlier this year I went on about Miss Marple at some length, arguing that the BBC adaptations starring Joan Hickson were superior to the recent ITV versions.

Now Will Howells has revealed a pleasing connection with the Liberal Democrats. The script for the BBC's Sleeping Murder was written by Matthew Taylor's father. (Matthew is Lib Dem MP for Truro & St Austell.)

A study of Ken Taylor's IMDB page shows that he also wrote the screenplay for Alfred the Great - a very 1960s realisation of the Dark Ages. So much so that it starred both David Hemmings and Michael York.

Nostalgia, Marxism and Miss Marple

I have found a short article by Alan McKee discussing the appeal of the BBC adaptations of Agatha Christie's Miss Marple books. These are the ones starring Joan Hickson, which I have discussed here before.

He suggests three reasons why this series was so appealing. I have no quarrel with the second and third of them, which are the quality of Joan Hickson's performance and the way the programmes offer a "pleasantly female-oriented version of detective mythology".

But the first worries me a little. McKee argues that it is because the Miss Marple adaptations are "prime examples of 'heritage' television":

The term "heritage television" sums up a certain attitude towards the past which developed in Britain during the 1980s, when a mixture of a new Victorianism in moral standards and an increasingly frenetic late-capitalistic commodification led to two tendencies. The first was an attraction to a particularly sanitised version of England's past. The second capitalized on the first with various moves towards rendering that past easily consumable - in television programs, films, bed sheets, jams and preserves, and so on.

I wonder. I always distrust this sort of Marxist analysis, if only because of the unexplained use of the term "late capitalism". Presumably we are now living through "even later capitalism", but there is still no sign of the Revolution.

It also assumes that an interest in the past is somehow excaptional and a sign that there is something wrong with present-day society. Presumably the idea is that in a socialist economy people would spend all their time working bare-chested in fields and factories and looking to the future, like the heroes of early Soviet propaganda films.

I suspect nostalgia is more central to the human condition than that. For it is not accurate to date the nostalgia boom to the Thatcherite 1980s.

The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady -which gave rise to lots of associated merchandise - was no.1 in the Sunday Times bestseller list for 64 weeks in the more collectivist years of 1977 and 1978. And I am sure it would be possible to find examples going back much further than that.

Besides, is Miss Marple as nostalgic as all that? Yes, there is great pleasure to be had from the period cars, clothes and so on. But the Joan Hickson programmes were precisely set in the years around 1950, and we do see social change taking place. Where an institution - Bertram's Hotel - has resisted all change, it turns out to be sinister.

Perhaps significantly, the series looked both forward and back in its casting too. It looked forward in that it featured George Baker as a police inspector and Kevin Whatley as a sergeant before either Wexford or Lewis came to the screen.

And it looked back in its use of actors and actresses familiar from films made decades before.

The most remarkable example of this was the cameo appearance by Joyce Carey in A Murder is Announced, made in 1985. She had appeared as an elderly landlady (Alastair Sim, as a fake medium, schemes to marry her) in London Belongs to Me, as early as 1948.

Yet more on (Miss) Marple

Will Howells has the latest developments.

Miss Marple heaven

This is what hard-core fans of the real Miss Marple will want.

A box set of all 12 BBC adaptations starring Joan Hickson.

Marplestolic succession

In a comment on an earlier posting, Mike Holmans mentions that Agatha Christie herself expressed the wish that the young Joan Hickson would one day play Miss Marple.

You can find the full story here.

Incidentally, my mother used to have a tortoiseshell cat called Miss Marple.

More on Miss Marple

I have been trying to work out why I believe Joan Hickson was a much better Miss Marple than Geraldine McEwan.

In part it is the two performances. McEwan is visibly acting the whole time - all those little smiles and grimaces - whereas Hickson hardly seemed to be acting at all. Outwardly she was all stillness, yet she managed to convey the underlying intelligence and the core of moral steel which brought murderers to justice.

And in part it is the people around them. With some of them now over 20 years old, the Hickson Miss Marples are beginning to look like a late manifestation of the mid-century Britain in which they were set. Such figures as Joan Greenwood and George Baker appear in the cast list; one of the films was even directed by Roy Boulting.

McEwan, by contrast, has to put up with the company of people like Dawn French and Harry Enfield. It's a prejudice of mine, but was there ever a more self-regarding and overrated generation than that which came to prominence in the 1980s? And even if you like these figures, there profile is such that they are always bigger than the characters they play.

I am not a great Agatha Christie fan. Her plots, with their fondness for impersonation of one character by another, are too convoluted. I gather that the Hickson films took some liberties with those plots, and the current series is taking more.

That does not worry me, as I tend to go along with these long crime and detection films for the ride rather than in any serious attempt to solve the mystery. There is nothing like a Morse or a Midsomer Murder to make you forget your troubles, and fidelity to the original novel is not that important as long as it is a pleasant ride.

So my feeling is that Joan Hickson's was an impeccable performance set off by a frequently immaculate supporting cast and sensetive direction. And Geraldine McEwan's is a lesser performance which is often hindered by the setting in which it has been placed.

Geraldine McEwan is not Miss Marple

Joan Hickson is.

I am trying to watch Sleeping Murder on ITV, but it's just not right.

Miss Marple meets Taxi Driver

Today's House Points column from Liberal Democrat News.

Tory Blues

Imagine an English village. Cricket on the green. Blue skies. Red telephone box. The sun shining upon the ancient stones of the church, the mellow bricks of the rectory and the thatch of the cottages.

A bobby cycles into view. He stops at one of those cottages and makes his way through the hollyhocks to the front door. When it opens, he can’t help noticing the corpse stretched out in the hall

“What’s all this then, madam?” he asks. “It’s a burglar, Constable McNally,” she replies. “He broke in during the night and my husband shot him.” “In that case I won’t take up any more of your time,” replies the officer, and rides off.

It’s a curious world – Miss Marple meets Taxi Driver – but it seems to be the one the Tories want to live in. On Friday they turned out in force to support Patrick Mercer’s private members bill allowing householders to use anything short of “grossly disproportionate force” to tackle intruders.

Mercer was addressing a real problem: the fear of crime in rural areas where police are far away. But rather than proposing a practical solution, such as more special constables, he went off with the fairies.

People do worry they will end up in court after defending themselves against burglars, though the figures suggest they have little cause. But even under Mercer’s law they would face investigation if a burglar was killed or injured. No real officer would behave like our PC McNally. And what constitutes “grossly disproportionate force” would ultimately be decided by juries, so some cases would still go to court.

This episode illustrates the decline of the Conservatives. To be a Tory you have to rather like life the way it is. Newspapers still reflect this. Spend an hour with the Guardian and become depressed. Read the Daily Telegraph and you come away convinced the world is full of things to enjoy.

Tory politicians no longer feel that way. Some demand the impossible, always clamouring to “bring back” something – usually matron or the birch. Others stoke fears over crime or immigration and offer solutions as bizarre as Mercer’s.

Of the old Conservative Party – that collection of contented people with a fat stake in the status quo – there in now little sign.