Access
A central problem with fictional amateur detectives (as opposed to a government detective affiliated with the police or even a professional or a “licensed” consulting detective) is how the author can write them legitimately into the plot and offer them access to a mystery that is, strictly speaking, none of their personal or professional concern. From an information behavior perspective, this problem is reframed as how to secure the detective access to an information world. For Christie, in the Marple novels, the specific problem is how to get Miss Marple to a place where she can access information, make her own judgments as to its value, analyze the information and present her conclusions in a way that is valued by those in a position to act upon them.
In twenty-first century detective fiction the same access problems exist, although they are often framed in terms of technology access. The amateur sleuth has to break into a computer system to get a DNA or autopsy report, or has to figure out how to kludge together some kind of wireless network in the face of jammers set up by the enemy or the police (who are often the same). For Miss Marple, while the technologies may be simpler, the information access problems are not necessarily more tractable. Before using tactics (below), she has to get to the right place (a hotel, a house, a town) and to do so requires leveraging her social position. From a social perspective, Miss Marple gets embedded structurally via her interpersonal relationships with the clergy or with individuals (almost always men) who have law enforcement power or substantial money. Miss Marple’s presence is not sufficient to provide access; solving a mystery, and meeting her ethical imperative of seeing the culprit brought to justice (by causing or taking action), requires access to information.
Social and physical access facilitates information access, but even access to information is not enough—one has to be able to act upon information, manipulate it, and be able to convince others to act upon it. For example, in The Body in the Library (1942), once Miss Marple is placed in a nearby hotel and in view of people who can help her, she can then engage in dialogue with the former Commissioner of Scotland Yard, Sir Henry Clithering, who can act legitimately upon her deductions and provide access to a network of individuals who can provide information of high value. Miss Marple begins her probe into this mystery via a typical self-devaluing statement, saying, “It’s rather embarrassing for me, because, of course, I am no use at all.”9 Sir Henry Clithering responds by interrogating the possibility that the people in this mystery will remind her of people she has already known, by asking, “No ideas? No village parallels?” Miss Marple then launches the rest of their interaction proper by offering the first move in an information-seeking process, saying, “I don’t know very much about it all yet.”10 A significant shift with respect to information seeking happens here: through the remainder of that chapter section, Marple does most of the talking; she is not seeking information from Sir Henry Clithering. Clithering has, as he phrases it, called Marple into consultation, and his contribution is actually to provide access to the people to whom Marple is subsequently able to speak in Chapter 9—Adelaide Jefferson and Mark Gaskell—who provide key information needed for her to solve the murders.
In The Body in the Library, there is little difficulty in getting Miss Marple into physical proximity to the location where most of the information activity about the murders is conducted (that is, not necessarily where the murders happened or the bodies were found, but where the key people are staying), because that location is a relatively public space (a hotel). A hotel-as-public-space is found in other Marple novels, such as At Bertram’s Hotel and A Caribbean Mystery. In these cases, as in The Body in the Library, the question of access is of gaining access to the information world itself, because physical access to the setting is not overly difficult (and any difficulties of financial access are solved generously and graciously by Miss Marple’s successful author nephew, Raymond West).
Some of the novels demonstrate a very different access problem, that of how to get Marple into a closed (country house) setting before she can focus on using information tactics to solve the mystery. A Pocket Full of Rye (1953) contains such an example of Marple gaining access to a very firmly bounded information world. In it she uses her age, gender, religion and social position, combined with the natural upheaval of a household that has been home to three murders, to insinuate herself not only into the mystery but into the house. This is described in Chapter 13, when she arrives unannounced at Yewtree Lodge after the third murder: “So charming, so innocent, such a fluffy and pink and white old lady was Miss Marple that she gained admittance to what was now practically a fortress in a state of siege.”11
Marple’s reason for putting all of these tools at her disposal into play is that she had prior personal knowledge of one of the victims—the victim whose role as a parlormaid rendered her the most powerless of the victims. Marple announces her arrival on the doorstep of Yewtree Lodge by saying, “I have come … to speak about the poor girl who was killed. Gladys Martin.” The butler immediately admits her to the house, where she engages in dialogue with a member of the household and is rapidly shepherded to Inspector Neele, the law enforcement representative on the premises in charge of the murder case. He uses his own knowledge of human nature to inform his decision to take Miss Marple into his confidence right away (“Miss Marple would be useful to him. She was upright, of unimpeachable rectitude and she had, like most old ladies, time on her hands and an old maid’s nose for scenting bits of gossip”),12 but later readers learn that he has also relied on a typical test of Miss Marple’s bona fides—verifying her worth with a powerful member of law enforcement—when he tells her: “I’ve heard something about you at the Yard…. It seems you’re fairly well-known there.”13 She responds in kind by admitting her long-standing friendship with Sir Henry Clithering. This information-world access problem resolved, Miss Marple and Inspector Neele proceed to share, sift, and organize information together to solve the mystery.14
Tactics
Gaining access to an information world is a necessary condition for engaging in the information practices needed to solve a mystery, but it is not a sufficient condition. Social and physical access facilitates information access, but simply having access to information is not enough—one has to be able to act upon information, manipulate it, and be able to convince others to act upon it. Once Miss Marple has established her bona fides with the right people (such as Sir Henry Clithering; although establishment of that relationship occurs primarily in the short stories, the relationship is leveraged in the novels), those people’s descriptions of her represent high value on her, the information she provides, and her information behaviors. This is in contrast with the descriptions of Miss Marple by people who have not yet seen her and who tend to continue to refer to her as an “old pussy” who is “nosy.”15 In other words, the uninitiated tend to consider Miss Marple an unsophisticated person who seeks information, but in a way that is morally questionable and of limited value because of her gender, her age and where she lives. Clithering, the retired head of Scotland Yard who is familiar with her skills, poses the alternative view, saying, “She’s just the finest detective God ever made. Natural genius cultivated in a suitable soil.”16 That “suitable soil” is exactly the small village in which she lives. Miss Marple argues for her use of the village as a source of knowledge about life by saying, “Nothing, I believe, is so full of life under the microscope as a drop of water from a stagnant pool.”17 Far from being an information-poor context, St. Mary Mead is unexpectedly information rich.
To solve each mystery, once she has gained access through physical location and through reputation, Miss Marple needs to act in various specific ways with respect to information. She needs to engage in a suite of information behaviors, most of which can be framed as “tactics,” because they are goal-focused and part of a larger—usually unexplicated, although not hidden, as part of Christie’s method for playing fair while keeping the solution from being too obvious to the
reader—strategy of attack.
When readers of the novels meet Miss Marple in The Murder at the Vicarage (1930), they soon encounter the conflict between her oft-repeated description of her own information world as being limited and simple—“Living alone, as I do, in a rather out-of-the-way part of the world”—and the complexity of her information behavior. One example of this complexity is her recognition of the need to ration information strategically when dealing with Inspector Slack: her tactic is complex rationing, in which she controls the amount, method and timing of disclosures, rather than a much more simplistic technique of withholding everything.18
In addition to controlling her information sharing, Marple uses tactics to confirm and elicit information, tactics well known in the literature and to readers. A common one is the bluff or trap, usually sprung using another person as a cat’s paw. A significant complexity in the use of this tactic is that Miss Marple carefully assesses from whom the false information that serves as the bait of the bluff or trap is likely to be believed. One example of this complexity is her choice of Megan, an unsophisticated twenty-year-old woman with no apparent qualifications as a blackmailer or as a detective’s assistant, to set a “blackmail” trap in The Moving Finger (1943). When the protagonist and narrator of The Moving Finger accuses Miss Marple of “roping in Megan” to this trap, which all along he claimed was far too dangerous an activity for Megan, Miss Marple tells him sternly:
There was no evidence against this very clever and unscrupulous man. I needed someone to help me, someone of high courage and good brains…. Yes, it was dangerous, but we are not put into this world, Mr. Burton, to avoid danger when an innocent fellow-creature’s life is at stake.19
Having decided that Megan was the correct person to deliver the blackmail information most plausibly, Miss Marple is not to be dissuaded by risk. Similarly, in The Murder at the Vicarage, the “false warning” trap Marple creates for the murderers is sprung by a village doctor, whom she chooses as being the most plausible deliverer of the false warning. Dr. Haydock has, earlier in the book, spoken openly of his sympathy for a medicalized view of crime, speculating that the tendency to murder or theft may be glandular and in that case should be cured rather than punished (judicially and socially).20 When Miss Marple plans to trap the murderers by having a false warning delivered to them that will stimulate their flight (an explicit indicator of guilt), she therefore selects Haydock as the most plausible information carrier, saying, “the warning should come from somebody who is known to have rather unusual views on these matters. Dr. Haydock’s conversation would lead anyone to suppose that he might view such a thing as murder from an unusual angle.”21 Because the doctor could plausibly be believed to be sharing true information that would facilitate the murderers’ escape, he is the perfect person to ensure their capture.
While much of Miss Marple’s information is acquired through everyday conversation and through her day-to-day lived experience, she also explicitly engages in information seeking tactics. Three of these will be discussed here. First is her use of what a modern reader would think of as an information source; Miss Marple’s personal use of formal information sources is relatively rare, and thus is noteworthy when it happens. For example, in The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side (1962), she pursues “her own methods of research,” requesting old film magazines from the proprietor of the local hairdressing parlor to help her understand the social world of film stars.22 In 4.50 from Paddington (1957), Miss Marple reaches out to Leonard Clement (the now-grown son of the vicar who lives next door to Miss Marple) for a railway map, using it to discover a likely dumping place for a dead body.23
Miss Marple also uses informal information sources, which include personal exchanges in which she is explicitly seeking information via questions, as well as artifacts that are not formal information sources.24 An example of such an artifact is found in A Murder Is Announced (1950), when Miss Marple refers to Miss Blacklock’s old correspondence to help solve a riddle of identity and subsequently a murder. Asking questions is considered a normal part of Miss Marple’s social role, and therefore is an information behavior she can perform without raising undue suspicion about her motives (even if she annoys people in the process, they are unlikely to be suspicious). As Inspector Neele muses to himself in A Pocket Full of Rye,
She’d get things out of servants and out of the women of the Fortescue family perhaps, that he and his policemen would never get. Talk, conjecture, reminiscences, repetitions of things said and done, out of it all she would pick the salient facts.25
Miss Marple herself repeatedly points out that it would be considered less normal if she didn’t ask questions in an inquisitive way. In Sleeping Murder (1976) she explains to the young married protagonists Gwenda and Giles that she has learned so much about the past surrounding the victim by “gossiping a little. In shops—and waiting for buses. Old ladies are supposed to be inquisitive.”26 Similarly, she reassures Inspector Craddock in A Murder Is Announced that she will be safer (despite being in assumed proximity to an as-yet-unidentified murderer) if she asks questions of the people she meets, saying, “we old women always do snoop. It would be very odd and much more noticeable if I didn’t.”27 Leveraging this ability to ask personal questions of practically everyone she meets allows Marple to elicit the information she needs in order to compare the situation at hand with a parallel experience from St. Mary Mead, or to share with the relevant law enforcement representative to build a more complete picture of the crime.
Lastly, Miss Marple uses physical tactics to seek information. Although her age generally prevents her from engaging in very vigorous or dangerous physical endeavors, she is not loath to perambulate herself in the service of justice. This is seen throughout the twelve novels, from the earliest to the latest. The Murder at the Vicarage finds her outside, ostensibly birdwatching while using her binoculars to gain information by spying on Gladys Cram. Later in that book, she is impelled by her curiosity at having received a wrong-number telephone call to venture abroad in the middle of the night to find out if she “couldn’t do something”28: “something” turns out to be identifying the murderer(s), saving an innocent man from being wrongly convicted or allowed to die, and designing the trap through which the murderer(s) would be caught. She spends her own money and embarks on two extra train journeys in 4.50 From Paddington in an effort to locate the likeliest spot for the disposal of the murder victim.
One of the most memorable of Miss Marple’s very physical excursions in search of information is her broken-heeled-shoe trek in A Caribbean Mystery (1964). Desiring to observe the surreptitious actions of Arthur Jackson in the cabin of his employer, Mr. Rafiel, she produces
a pair of shoes the heel of one of which she had recently caught on a hook by the door. It was now in a slightly precarious state and Miss Marple adroitly rendered it even more precarious by attention with a nail file.29
Carrying this engineered shoe as a prop, “with all the care of a Big Game Hunter approaching upwind of a herd of antelope, Miss Marple gently circumnavigate[s] Mr. Rafiel’s bungalow.”30 She lies down on the ground, waiting to see if Jackson has heard her and ready with her broken heel excuse should he appear. He does not, and, “shielding herself slightly with a festoon of creeper she peer[s] inside.”31
Marple engages in a variety of information behaviors, including seeking information from formal and informal sources, using physical tactics to seek information, and developing complex techniques for providing information to others. For information to be useful, or considered useful, or acted upon, it also needs to be considered valuable within the information world in which it is being deployed. Miss Marple and Agatha Christie work together to characterize, describe and manipulate information value for the characters within the novels and for the reader.
Value
Marple often signifies the disclosure of valuable information by undervaluing herself, prefacing her disclosure by saying things such as “I know that I am very ofte
n rather foolish and don’t take in things as I should.”32 She then provides information that others value because it is based on her sound logic (for example, the flawed timing of the Colonel’s note in The Murder at the Vicarage) or on tangible physical evidence (such as Lawrence Redding’s rock which is not the correct type for her rock garden, or the wilted plant in the Vicar’s study). Although Miss Marple consistently presents her evidence and logic using devaluing language, her information behaviors are not only complex. They also intentionally produce information that will be valued and thus acted upon by people who need it and have the power, directly or by proxy, to protect the innocent and convict the guilty.
In the earlier section on “access,” I argued that Miss Marple has to rely on people in authority to facilitate her access to information settings; similarly, because she is a private individual, she must convince someone with law enforcement authority that her information has value. Only once they are convinced will they be willing to act. In general Miss Marple relies on one key player figuring out for himself (he being a man who has the needed authority or power) that her reasoning and conclusions are almost always accurate, rather than she actively seeking to prove her worth. This one key player who satisfied himself of her value—often Sir Henry Clithering, as noted earlier—then justifies Marple to others who may question her skills. In some cases, such justification is not sufficient, and Marple is explicitly tested.
The Ageless Agatha Christie Page 18