Friday Book Report: Murder at the Vicarage by Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie is known as “The Queen of Mystery” for good reason.  In the novel, The Murder at the Vicarage, the character of Miss Jane Marple makes her debut as an amateur investigator trying to solve the mystery of the murder at the vicarage.  This book was first published in 1930.

In the tiny village of St. Mary Mead nothing ever happens, until one day Colonel Protheroe is found dead in the vicar’s study.  Colonel Protheroe isn’t a very popular man within the village, even the vicar, Len Clement has voiced his opinions that the world would be a better place if Protheroe was no longer in it.  That casual remark comes back to haunt him when he finds Protheroe laid out across his writing desk with a bullet in his head.  In a town such as St. Mary Mead, gossip and rumors start flying around, and everyone has a theory as to who shot the Colonel.  Miss Jane Marple, elderly spinster and busybody with her talent for human observation and deduction believes there are at least seven residents of the town with a motive to kill the Colonel, and as the clues start to come in, Miss Marple uses those powers of deduction to try and solve the town’s biggest mystery to date.

This was my first Christie novel and while it wasn’t what I was expecting, I still did enjoy it.  It’s a straight up mystery, which isn’t my favorite genre, but it was still an enjoyable read.  And at least now I can say I have read a Christie mystery novel.  All of the characters are well developed and most play a very important role in the plotline.  While the book is about a murder and the investigation to find who killed the Colonel, I found I was more interested in the fascinating characters that made up the town of St. Mary Mead.  The vicar and his wife added some humor to an otherwise grim storyline, Inspector Slack was your quintessential police investigator, and Miss Marple is in a class all her own.

Miss Marple, the elderly neighbor of the vicar and his wife, has a knack for observation – or spying, depending on your viewpoint – and she excels at evaluating human nature.  She’s very clever and cunning, and while most people would simply disregard the speculations of an elderly woman, her conclusions about human behavior are so precise that it’s hard for any of the investigators to ignore her theories.

This book is written from the point of view of the vicar, Len Clement, which I wasn’t expecting at all.  I mean, it’s a Miss Marple novel and I just assumed it would be from her point of view, but it’s not and Miss Marple isn’t in this book as much as I thought she would be.  I wasn’t expecting that, but it actually makes sense once I sat down to think about it.  In the 1920’s, an elderly woman wouldn’t be privy to all the information that the vicar received while the murder was being investigated, and in fact the main source of information for Miss Marple was the vicar, otherwise I doubt Miss Marple would’ve collected enough of the facts to help solve the case.  So, while it was unexpected to have the point of view of the vicar instead of Miss Marple’s, it completely makes sense and is actually more believable written this way.

What would have otherwise been a so-so book for me turns into something rather enjoyable because of the vicar Clement and his younger wife, Griselda.  They make this story for me.  The mystery is all well and good, and Miss Marple is a charming dear, but its Len and his wife that are the stars in my mind.  Griselda is much younger than her husband, she isn’t the demure housewife one would expect a parson to marry, the two couldn’t be any more different, and yet he absolutely adores her, and she him.  The vicar’s narration is brilliant, and his character analysis of all the inhabitants of St. Mary Mead is spot-on, even if it isn’t the most charitable given his profession.  I thoroughly enjoyed their story, and if I knew they were involved in other Christie novels, I would definitely pick up a few more to read.

The mystery genre isn’t my favorite, if there’s a mystery in the book I usually like it if there’s more than just a mystery to figure out.  It’s a bit like reading 250 pages of the board game Clue, and that isn’t really my thing, but for all that I did enjoy this book and I really enjoyed finally reading a Christie novel.  It’s hard for me to rate this book because mystery isn’t my genre, but the writing and the story and the characters are all worthy of a solid B grade.  While this book was written well and the mystery developed nicely, you never really knew who did it until the end (at least I didn’t) which is what you want in a mystery novel, I found the book just didn’t pull me in like I thought it would.  It took me longer than it should have to read this book, and it’s not because I didn’t like it, I just wasn’t as enthralled in this book and I took my time in finishing it.  Still, anyone that’s a fan of mystery novels should enjoy this book, and any fan of literature has got to read at least one Miss Marple story by Agatha Christie; who is without a doubt a literary icon.