The Ageless Agatha Christie

by Bernthal, J. C. ;

  Inspector Craddock explicitly “tests” Marple soon after the first murder in A Murder Is Announced. As Sir Henry Clithering’s godson, Craddock has already been told that Miss Marple is a worthy ally, but, as a competent detective, Craddock is determined to verify this information himself. Craddock tests Marple during their first meeting by saying, “The truth of the matter is that the facts are indisputable. Whatever conflicting details these people give, they all saw one thing.” Miss Marple responds by pointing out, “gently” we are told, that “they couldn’t—actually—have seen anything at all” because they were all in a dark room with a single bright light being shined into their eyes.33 In response Craddock increases his assessment of the value of her potential contributions, thinking to himself, “She’d got it! She was sharp, after all. He was testing her by that speech of his, but she hadn’t fallen for it.”34

  Another way Miss Marple helps shape others’ valuing of the information they find is by encouraging skepticism. She frequently reminds people that they need to question the value of all the information around them, but particularly information they get from other people. It is not that she places no value on information provided by people, but again (as with her use of the rationing tactic mentioned earlier), her approach is more nuanced than binary (by binary I mean a choice of assigning no value or having absolute trust). So, while Miss Marple rarely uses formal information sources, and makes extensive use of information she gets from other people, she treats that information with high skepticism and processes it using logic and her prior knowledge of how humans act in specific situations or in response to specific stimuli. She frequently reminds others that they should apply more skepticism in their valuations of information. In The Body in the Library, Miss Marple summarizes this process of information valuing to Mrs. Bantry: “The trouble in this case is that everybody has been much too credulous and believing,” she states. “You simply cannot afford to believe everything that people tell you. When there’s anything fishy about, I never believe anyone at all! You see, I know human nature so well.”35

  Similarly, in Sleeping Murder, Marple uses her concerns about the naïveté of the protagonists (young Gwenda and Giles, mentioned above) to justify gaining access to the information world surrounding their mystery. Of Gwenda and Giles, she says, “I’m worried about those two. They’re very young and inexperienced and much too trusting and credulous. I feel I ought to be there to look after them.”36 Having gained access to this information world (on “doctor’s orders”) Miss Marple frequently reminds the protagonists and thus the reader to apply skepticism to any information that comes from people. By the end of the book, she has repeated this exhortation so many times that she even reveals a hint of exasperation, saying, “My dear Giles, you’ve fallen into the trap again—the trap of believing what is said to you.”37

  Marple’s skepticism over information provided through what people say is foregrounded in They Do It with Mirrors, where it is apparently placed in direct contradiction with her friend and host Carrie Louise Serrocold’s inherent trusting nature. Miss Marple says of her old friend, “Carrie Louise is not an ordinary woman. She lives by her trust, by her belief in human nature.”38 While in Sleeping Murder the need for skepticism is stressed repeatedly, in They Do It with Mirrors, Marple’s tendency toward skepticism is repeatedly contrasted with Mrs. Serrocold’s trusting nature. In the end, however, Serrocold’s trust and belief in what she thought and felt provide Marple with the most effective direction for her own skepticism; Marple realizes that, rather than her normal tactic of not believing what she was told, she needs in this case to disbelieve what she saw. Marple explains towards the end:

  Everyone kept saying how Carrie Louise lived in another world from this and was out of touch with reality. But actually, Carrie Louise, it was reality you were in touch with, and not the illusion. You are never deceived by illusion like most of us are. When I suddenly realized that, I saw that I must go by what you thought and felt.39

  She goes on to say, “So therefore, if I was to go by you, all the things that seemed to be true were only illusions.”40 Even a reader familiar enough with Marple to exercise a healthy skepticism of information provided by others can be fooled by this subtle twist.

  The Moving Finger provides an extended example of information value that includes aspects of skepticism, authority, and truth.41 The plot of The Moving Finger is organized around a specific information type—the malicious anonymous letter—that is in one way of very low value, because it is despised, detested, and reviled, yet is in some ways that actually “count,” of very high value. By “ways that actually count,” I mean value assessments that influence people’s beliefs and actions. Information does not have to be true to have value in the sense that it influences thoughts and actions. False information can also have high value in the sense that it influences people to behave or act badly; the value here is not in the truth, but in the impact on actions.

  Within the novel, one character (Mrs. Dane Calthrop, who also serves as Miss Marple’s means of access to this information world; as the vicar’s wife and Miss Marple’s friend, she invites Marple to stay in her home specifically to help solve the mystery) points out that the information contained within the anonymous letters is factually inaccurate—but false information can have high value and influence people’s behavior strongly. The malicious letters in The Moving Finger, or rather the information contained within them, influence people’s beliefs and actions in specific ways. Boyfriends are made to feel (unjustly) suspicious of girlfriends; a brother and sister are made to feel (inaccurately) unwelcome in town; a secretary and a maid change employers to avoid (non-existent) scandals.

  Mrs. Dane Calthrop has pointed out that the anonymous letters are not true and have no face value as information; but the information contained in them still has high negative value as evaluated by its influence on thought and action. At this point Marple engages in the second prong of the double bluff and reveals that in reality, the letters also do not actually carry the high negative value that pretends to undergird them. Not only do the letters and their contents have no information value that derives from truth, they also have no true intentional value; there is no true malicious intent behind the letters because they are all just a distractor. Or, while there is malicious intent behind the sending of the letters, it has nothing to do with the information contained in the letters (true or false) or its perceived value by their recipients. They are serving exclusively as a distractor, and their complicated low/high information value is distracting the characters in the novel and the reader from a far more mundane act of evil: a man’s murder of his wife.

  Marple explains the letters’ role as a distractor using a phrase (“no smoke without fire”) that is a motif of the novel: “If you disregard the smoke and come to the fire,” she suggests, “you know where you are. You just come down to the actual facts of what happened. And putting aside the letters, just one thing happened—Mrs. Symington died.”42 The plot twist revealed when Marple solves the mystery is an information value twist. Once Miss Marple (and the other characters, and the reader) disregard the smoke and come to the fire—that is, focus on the information whose value is associated with real motivations—only then can justice be achieved.

  This essay has focused on a small yet rich sub-set of the Christie corpus, the twelve Miss Marple novels. Using information worlds theory, and specifically the concepts of information behavior and information value, I examined three aspects of Miss Marple’s praxis: access, tactics, and value. In each case, the hard work put in by Agatha Christie and by Miss Marple is shown to be more nuanced than might be expected, and indicates how information sources and information behavior operate in complex ways in these information worlds. Miss Marple, as a woman, often uses typically feminine self-devaluating language and relies on men to gain access to information worlds and to support the perceived value of her information—to make it “actionable.” This analysis has demonstrated that the
information tactics she employs are smart, sophisticated and effective.

  My hope is that the reader, having read this essay, will in the future encounter detective fiction in part by looking at information worlds, how the fictional detectives are constrained by their information worlds and how they gain access to information worlds. Information behaviors and tactics used in detective fiction are complex and rely on the readers’ shared and usually tacit understanding of information value, which can be manipulated by the author through the characters’ actions and dialogue as well as through narrative. Both formal and informal information sources are discovered, referred to, evaluated, and applied in detective novels; the use of modern information technology to support storage, access and delivery of sources does not matter so much as the information behaviors and valuations that are applied to them. Information behavior in detective fiction is not just finding the facts and then solving the murder. It is a much more complex story of access, tactics and manipulating information value.

  Notes

  1. Agatha Christie, The Murder at the Vicarage (London: HarperCollins, 2005), p. 56.

  2. For exceptions, see Rhiannon Gainor, “The Relevant Clues: Information Behavior and Assessment in Classic Detective Fiction,” presented at the annual conference of the Canadian Association for Information Science, Fredericton, Canada, June 2–4, 2011; Deborah Hicks and Caroline Whippey, “‘Everyone Forgets that Knowledge Is the Ultimate Weapon’: Information Seeking Practices in Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” presented at the annual conference of the Canadian Association for Information Science, Waterloo, Canada, May 31, 2012; Don. L. Latham and Jonathan M. Hollister, “The Games People Play: Information and Media Literacies in the Hunger Games Trilogy,” Children’s Literature in Education 45 (2014), pp. 33–46.

  3. Recent work includes Michelle M. Kazmer, et al., “Information Use Environments of African-American Dementia Caregivers Over the Course of Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy for Depression,” Library & Information Science Research 35.3 (2013), pp. 191–199; Michelle M. Kazmer, et al., “Distributed Knowledge in an Online Patient Support Community: Authority and Discovery,” Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology 65.7 (2014), pp. 1319–1334.

  4. Gary Burnett and Paul R. Jaeger, “Small Worlds, Lifeworlds, and Information: The Ramifications of the Information Behavior of Social Groups in Public Policy and the Public Sphere” Information Research 13.2 (2008), paper 346.

  5. Elfreda A. Chatman, “Life in a Small World: Applicability of Gratification Theory to Information-Seeking Behavior,” Journal of the American Society for Information Science 42 (1991), pp. 438–449; “A Theory of Life in the Round,” Journal of the American Society for Information Science 50.3 (1999), pp. 207–217.

  6. Jurgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984).

  7. These are the Marple novels with the date of first publication: The Murder at the Vicarage (1930); The Body in the Library (1942); The Moving Finger (1943); A Murder is Announced (1950); They Do It with Mirrors (1952); A Pocket Full of Rye (1953); 4.50 from Paddington (1957); The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side (1962); A Caribbean Mystery (1964); At Bertram’s Hotel (1965); Nemesis (1971); Sleeping Murder (1976, but written decades earlier).

  8. The word “praxis” is not a focus of this essay, but it was selected intentionally because of Miss Marple’s insistence on action. Her middle-of-the-night raid on Mr. Rafael in A Caribbean Mystery (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1965, pp. 226–227) has all the key elements of Miss Marple-ness—a surprise attack, a knitted scarf, an insistence on action, and the ostensible devaluing of her own ideas—in one tidy package: “Miss Marple, standing there in the moonlight, her head encased in a fluffy scarf of pale pink wool” says, “I think we may have to act quickly. Very quickly. I have been foolish. Extremely foolish. I ought to have known from the very beginning what all this was about. It was so simple.”

  9. Agatha Christie, The Body in the Library (London: HarperCollins), p. 77.

  10. Ibid.

  11. Agatha Christie, A Pocket Full of Rye (London: HarperCollins, 2006), p. 82.

  12. Ibid., p. 87.

  13. Ibid., p. 165.

  14. Among the Marple novels this one is unusual: at the end of the narrative, the reader, Miss Marple, and Inspector Neele all know who the culprit is, but an arrest has not occurred.

  15. Agatha Christie, Nemesis (New York: HarperCollins, 2013), ch. 3, section 3; Agatha Christie, At Bertram’s Hotel (New York: Black Dog & Leventhal, 2007), p. 11; Christie, The Body in the Library, p. 140.

  16. Agatha Christie, A Murder Is Announced (New York: Black Dog & Leventhal, 2006), p. 47.

  17. Christie, The Murder at the Vicarage, p. 168.

  18. In The Murder at the Vicarage, another female character, Lettice Protheroe, engages in strategic information rationing. Like Miss Marple, she is more interested in an accurate outcome than in providing strictly “true” information during the rationing process (p. 184).

  19. Agatha Christie, The Moving Finger (New York: HarperCollins, 2013), ch. 13.

  20. Christie, The Murder at the Vicarage, p. 112.

  21. Ibid., p. 247.

  22. Agatha Christie, The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side (New York: HarperCollins, 2013), ch. 13.

  23. Agatha Christie, 4.50 from Paddington (New York: Black Dog & Leventhal, 2007), p. 30.

  24. See Donald O. Case, Looking For Information: A Survey of Research on Information Seeking, Needs, and Behavior, 3d ed. (Bingley: Emerald, 2012).

  25. Christie, A Pocket Full of Rye, p. 87.

  26. Agatha Christie, Sleeping Murder (New York: HarperCollins, 2013), ch. 11.

  27. Christie, A Murder Is Announced, p. 127.

  28. Christie, The Murder at the Vicarage, p. 237.

  29. Christie, A Caribbean Mystery, p. 184.

  30. Ibid.

  31. Ibid., p. 185. Ellipsis original.

  32. Christie, The Murder at the Vicarage, p. 54. See related literature: Pamela McKenzie and Philippa Spoel, “Borrowed Voices: Conversational Storytelling in Midwifery Healthcare Visits,” Canadian Journal for Studies in Discourse and Writing 25.1 (2014); R. Savolainen, “Asking and Sharing Information in the Blogosphere: The Case of Slimming Blogs,” Library & Information Science Research 33.1 (2011), pp. 73–79.

  33. Christie, A Murder Is Announced, p. 102.

  34. Ibid. In A Pocket Full of Rye, Inspector Neele similarly tests Miss Marple by making a false assertion about the order of two of the murders to see if she will correct him. She does.

  35. Christie, The Body in the Library, p. 127. Emphasis original.

  36. Christie, Sleeping Murder, ch. 25.

  37. Ibid. Emphasis original.

  38. Agatha Christie, They Do It with Mirrors (London: HarperCollins, 2013), ch. 11.

  39. Ibid., ch. 23.

  40. Ibid. Emphasis original.

  41. “Truth” is a contentious characteristic of “information,” and rightly so. See Case, Looking for Information, pp. 67–68.

  42. Christie, The Moving Finger.

  Bibliography

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  _____. “Small Worlds, Lifeworlds, and Information: The Ramifications of the Information Behavior of Social Groups in Public Policy and the Public Sphere.” Information Research 13.2 (2008), paper 346. http://InformationR.net/ir/13–2/paper346.html

  Burnett, Kathleen, Mega M. Subramaniam, and Amelia N. Gibson. “Latinas Cross the IT Border: Understanding Gender as a Boundary Object Between Information Worlds,” First Monday 14.9 (2009). http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2581/2286

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  _____. “A Theory of Life in the Round.” Journal of the American Society for Information Science 50.3 (1999), pp. 207–217.

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  Gainor, Rhiannon. “The Relevant Clues: Information Behavior and Assessment in Classic Detective Fiction.” Presented at the annual conference of the Canadian Association for Information Science, Fredericton, June 2–4, 2011. www.cais-acsi.ca/ojs/index.php/cais/article/view/264

  Habermas, Jurgen. The Theory of Communicative Action. Boston: Beacon Press, 1984.

  Hicks, Deborah, and Caroline Whippey. “‘Everyone Forgets That Knowledge Is the Ultimate Weapon’: Information Seeking Practices in Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” Presented at the annual conference of the Canadian Association for Information Science, Waterloo, May 31–June 2, 2011. www.cais-acsi.ca/ojs/index.php/cais/article/view/639