Books: Marple Is Willing

(2 of 2)

In the early books, like The Murder at the Vicarage, Miss Marple was a snoop as well as a sleuth, "the worst old cat in the village." Her famous garden was a smokescreen, and her fondness for observing birds through powerful glasses could be turned to other purposes. As time passed, Dr. Haydock had to tell Miss Marple gently that gardening was making her rheumatism worse. She became quieter and less flighty. But her methods of detection were always the same. Where Poirot used his "little gray cells," Jane Marple extrapolated from her knowledge of St. Mary Mead. A swindler? She remembers Mrs. Trout, who "drew the old-age pension, you know, for three old women who were dead, in different parishes." A cruel murderer? "Mrs. Green, you know. She buried five children— and every one of them insured."

The villain in Sleeping Murder is not nearly so enterprising. About all Miss Marple has to do is to keep her dogged young friends from pursuing their own dim-witted plans. What is comforting about the book is Miss Marple's presence and the fact that the author could not bring herself to do her character in.

As Miss Marple once told her friend Elspeth McGillicuddy during a horticultural discussion, "Peonies are unaccountable. Either they do— or they don't do. But if they do establish themselves, they are with you for life." The old spinster apparently became like the peonies in her garden.