“Agatha Christie: Marple: Twelve New Stories”
Publisher: William Morrow
Pages: 370
Price: $28.99 (Hardcover)
Twelve Female Mystery Writers Recreate Miss Marple
Most readers will know that Agatha Christie died in 1976, having published 12 Miss Marple novels and several collections of Miss Marple stories.
Christie also wrote Hercule Poirot mysteries, Tommy and Tuppence mysteries and 21 stand-alone novels, a total of 81 books.
Her books have sold over a billion copies in English and another billion in foreign languages. Only the Bible and Shakespeare have sold better.
In the last few years, it has become fairly common, when a mystery writer dies, to have someone take over the franchise. If people want more, make more!
Alabama writer Ace Atkins carried on the Robert B. Parker novels featuring the Boston detective Spenser. Atkins so thoroughly immersed himself in Spenser’s speech and habits, one can hardly tell Parker did not write the novels himself.
This is mostly true here as well.
William Morrow has chosen 12 very successful women mystery writers to write Marple stories and there is hardly a false note.
And I have read a LOT of Marple.
It would be an interesting experiment to mix these stories with Christie Marple stories and see if readers could tell which was which. A kind of “blind reading,” to coin a phrase.
“Evil in Small Places” was chosen as the first story I think because it contains most of the Marple themes. The opening line is: “I wonder sometimes, if there isn’t a concentration of evil in small places”—spoken by Jane, to the horror of her friend Prudence.
The ladies discuss why this might be true. Boredom might be a factor. And people know too much about one another’s business. People can rub each other the wrong way—every day! Irritation festers. For slights, revenge is sought.
The Old Guard might not accept newcomers for decades, causing resentment.
We are also advised to be civil to our servants. They know everything and you want them on your side.
In this and several other stories we are told the importance of close observation. An envelope in pristine condition with a threatening note was to be outgoing mail, not incoming. Elsewhere, a photograph on a shelf holds a clue, especially if it later goes missing.
“Murder at the Vicarage” was the first Miss Marple. Here the story is “The Second Murder at the Vicarage,” with a wry opening narrated by the vicar—a variation on the person with two or three dead spouses. “To have one murder in one’s vicarage is unfortunate; to have a second looks remarkably like carelessness.”
As was famously the case in Cabot Cove in “Murder She Wrote,” if all the stories were in St. Mary Mead the town would contain only the ghosts of the murdered, so these stories, like Christie’s, are set everywhere: on an ocean liner, in Manhattan, on Cape Cod, and of course in London.
Many of the victims are women and many of the killers also. Yes, they usually use poison, but not always. Not all the stories are murder mysteries. One is the unravelling of a clever con.
I noticed a new wrinkle in male villainy, the handsome cad who seduces NOT the beautiful heiress but the more vulnerable Plain Jane, driving them to despair and even suicide.
And as was less overt in Christie, several of these writers comment on the difficulties of being a woman of a certain age. One character remarks: “Age is cruel, and crueller still to women. A woman becomes a ghost when she stops being worth looking at.”
Several stories feature Raymond West, Marple’s nephew the mystery writer, which gives the writers a chance to say things like writing books is “much more difficult than it seems.”
Don Noble’s newest book is Alabama Noir, a collection of original stories by Winston Groom, Ace Atkins, Carolyn Haines, Brad Watson, and eleven other Alabama authors.
