A Miss Marple Quintet is an omnibus edition of Agatha Christie works published by Collins in 1978. It features five Miss Marple novels: The Murder at the Vicarage, A Murder is Announced, A Pocket Full of Rye, The Mirror Crack'd from Side to Side and At Bertram's Hotel. The collection is introduced by H. R. F. Keating, a crime writer who later became president of the Detection Club between 1985 and 2000. In 1977 he had edited a book of essays on Agatha Christie: Agatha Christie: First Lady of Crime.
H. R. F. Keating's Introduction[]
In introducing Miss Marple to Christie's readers, Keating contrasts her with her (perhaps better known counterpart) Hercule Poirot. Where Poirot is "a most cunningly collected ragbag of all the odd eccentricities one would expect of a dazzlingly brilliant foreigner, Miss Marple is a single person and a real one, based indeed to some extent on her creator's own grandmother." To Keating, Miss Marple's methods are distinctly different from the "logic world" of the "little grey cells". He suggests that readers compare Miss Marple's methods in The Mirror Crack'd from Side to Side to another book written 30 years earlier, Lord Edgware Dies where Poirot solves essentially the same problem.
Keating posits that Miss Marple's success lies in five linked qualities:
- Extensive knowledge of people and the way they behave, mainly from observing closely the people of St. Mary Mead;
- Love of gossip which gave her knowledge of a wide variety of people and motives open and hidden;
- A gift for making comparisons (her village parallels);
- Intuition. (see Agatha Christie's own take on this in her article Does a Woman's Instinct Make Her a Good Detective?;
- A nose for evil.
In reading the Miss Marple novels, Keating advises readers to look out for the brilliant techniques with which Christie deploys to misdirect. There are two main classes of techniques: the verbal and the visual. Keating gives examples, but not from the five novels in the collection, so as not to give away spoilers.
In one instance of a verbal misdirection, there is a name which readers would quite easily expect to be given to a girl but which later turned out to be used for a boy. "Dame Agatha was a mistress of using our ordinary expectations, what is called the received image, for her own cunning ends."
In the realm of visual trickery, Poirot asks a butler if the date on a wall calendar had been torn off since the murder took place. The butler walked over to the calendar and looked at it before answering. Most readers would begin to think that the date was significant. However in this case, Christie was merely pointing out that the butler was so short-sighted that he had to get close to the calendar to read it, and so was not a totally reliable witness.
As a final warning to readers, Keating advises readers to "beware of mirrors".
Blurb on front flap[]
Jane Marple appeared for the first time in 1930 in MURDER AT THE VICARAGE and has continued to charm readers ever since. Here are five of her most famous stories with a delightful introduction about Agatha Christie's favourite character by H. R. F. Keating.
In her autobiography, Agatha Christie wrote "I had no intention of continuing her for the rest of my life. I did not know she was to become a rival to Hercule Poirot". There are many who will, like the author herself, find Miss Marple's methods of detection even more attractive than her Belgian counterpart.
MURDER AT THE VICARAGE is set in Miss Marple's own village, St Mary Mead, where it seems that nothing ever happens ... until one day Colonel Protheroe is found shot through the head in the vicarage study.
A MURDER IS ANNOUNCED involves an intriguing announcement by a murderer of when he is to commit his crime--and where.
A POCKET FULL OF RYE has some intriguing ingredients: the strange behaviour of Rex Fortesque before his death, the grains of cereal found in his pocket, the unexpected return of the prodigal son, and the cyptic announcement of old Aunt Effie: "old sins have long shadows".
THE MIRROR CRACED FROM SIDE TO SIDE is set in the house of a famous film actress: what did Marie Gregg see just before a murder was committed there? And what caused her expression to change so violently that one observed was reminded of Tennyson, and the Lady of Shalott?
In AT BERTRAM'S HOTEL the reader finds herself in an establishment patronised by the higher echelons of the clergy, dowager ladies of the aristocracy, girls on their way home from expensive boarding schools ... hardly, it would seem, the place for a murder.
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