Your Humble Blogger picked up Miss Marple: The Complete Short Stories (New York: Berkley 1986) by Agatha Christie, who was for many years the single most popular writer in the English language. Or so I remember hearing; it may not have been true. At any rate, she was, in her day, more than comparable to a Steven King or a John Grisham. The highbrow may well have mocked her, but they read her, and so did everybody else.
As did I, growing up. I’m sure I’ve read all these before, although I can’t say I remembered any of them. The thing that really struck me about the stories, though, was how they broke important ‘rules’ of writing short stories. First of all, of the twenty short stories in the book, fourteen (if I’ve counted correctly) have the same basic structure: someone tells a story about a murder, and asks the listeners to guess who did it. Everyone guesses incorrectly except Miss Marple.
In other words, all of the action in the story is told second-hand. The rules, usually, say that you should show the action directly, whenever you can. Imagine that you are in a writing workshop of some kind, and you have an idea for a murder story. There’s greed, or jealousy, or insanity; somebody makes a decision to kill somebody, makes a clever plan (How clever? Well, some are clevererer than others.) and carries it out. The authorities are, at least briefly, misled. A discovery is made! The guilty person is found! Justice (of a sort) is done!
OK, so where do you start the story? Following William Goldman, do you start it as late into the story as you can? Or do you follow Ruth Rendell and start it with the murderer’s furtive and mad plotting? I’ll tell you what you don’t do—you don’t start it five years later with a minor character reminiscing about the whole thing at a dinner party. Your workshop fellows would insist that you begin the whole thing again, this time telling the story of the murder, rather than the story of someone telling the story of the murder.
Except ... are the Miss Marple stories really about murder? Or are they stories about dinner parties? I suspect that part of their success is that they are not dangerous, disturbing, difficult stories about jealousy, greed, and murder, but quiet, amusing little stories about conversations, and a little old lady getting the better of her younger, more successful companions. The punch line is not, as you would expect in a murder story, the revelation of the murderer (or, occasionally, of the victim), but the revelation of Miss Marple’s acumen and the surprised respect it inspires among well-to-do men.
There are twelve Miss Marple novels; I’ve read them all, I think, and remember none of them. I suspect that they, like the other six stories in this collection, feature Miss Marple a somewhat more active role. In the short stories, she is consulted while the events are unfolding, rather than after the end of the story proper. They aren’t as successful, to me. Of course, if you’re making Miss Marple movies, or television shows, the dinner party stories really don’t work; I believe that most of those are adaptations of Poirot stories, with the detective changed for maximum sales value.
Redintegro Iraq,
-Vardibidian.
This reminds me of Asimov’s tales of the Black Widowers, which were possibly even a little more formulaic—introductory material, one person presents a baffling mystery (more often a puzzle, really), everyone is baffled, butler answers the mystery, everyone is impressed. I wonder if Asimov got the structure from Christie.
But I think with Asimov, the stories were really puzzles; everything else was window-dressing.
Good points about workshops, btw.