The Least Likely Person

I write crime novels, which means I know where the bodies are buried in the genre, and the biggest one is this: the detective is the only character you are contractually forbidden to suspect. The butler is fair game. The vicar’s wife is fair game. The nice young man with the limp and the inheritance is practically a confession on legs. But the person who arrives after the body, asks all the questions, wanders unaccompanied through every bedroom in the house and is present, without fail, at the next death — that person gets a cup of tea and a lift to the station.

Nobody has ever abused this arrangement like Jane Marple. I have opened a file.

The arithmetic

St Mary Mead is a village in the Home Counties with a population somewhere between three and four hundred, a vicarage, a pub, a doctor, and a homicide rate that would make Baltimore sit down. Across twelve novels and twenty short stories Miss Marple is present at, or fetched to, somewhere north of forty unnatural deaths. Television did this sum on Jessica Fletcher years ago and concluded that Cabot Cove, Maine, was the most dangerous place on earth. Cabot Cove had a forty-year head start to catch up on. Nobody ran the numbers on St Mary Mead because the numbers arrived in a cardigan.

Proximity

But the body count is the boring statistic. The interesting one is the survival rate of people who stand near her.

Think of it from an actuary’s chair. There is a woman in the Home Counties whose mere presence in a building correlates with a violent death inside it, at a strength no cigarette has ever managed. If she were a chemical she would be banned. If she were a district it would be evacuated. Instead she is invited to stay. Repeatedly. By people who have read the newspapers.

Dolly Bantry finds a corpse in her library before breakfast and her first telephone call is not to the police. It is to Jane. That is either the instinct of a woman who knows who solves murders, or the instinct of a woman who knows who to ring about this one. Dolly, I should note, is still alive at the end of the canon. Whatever she is, she is useful.

The pattern for everybody else is grimmer, and it has a shape. Someone kind invites Miss Marple to stay, because she has been poorly and needs a rest. She arrives. She unpacks. Within the week, someone in the house is dead, and everyone agrees it must have been very upsetting for her. A rest, you’ll notice, for whom? She leaves each of these houses visibly refreshed. Everybody else leaves in a hearse or a police car.

And it is not confined to the living. In Sleeping Murder she visits a young couple who have just bought a house, and a murder committed there the best part of twenty years earlier promptly surfaces, as if it had been waiting for her. She can do it retroactively. This is not a skill. It is a weather system.

If Jane Marple has accepted your invitation, update your will. She will have read it anyway.

The nephews

Miss Marple has nephews the way other women have cats: an uncounted number, appearing when convenient. The senior one, Raymond, is a successful novelist who periodically pays to send his aunt somewhere restful. He sends her to the Caribbean. A man dies. He installs her in a smart London hotel. It turns out to be a front for organised crime. At no point in the canon does Raymond stop, look at the pattern, and put his chequebook away. Either he is the least observant novelist in England or he is laundering something, and I would like him interviewed.

Her doctor is worse. Dr Haydock, her own physician, at one point looks at his elderly patient, low in spirits and confined to the house, and suggests, on the record, that what would really perk her up is a nice murder. She gets one within the week. I have practised medicine for exactly no years and even I can see that this is not a prescription. It is a referral.

The knitting

Consider the knitting, because nobody else has. She is knitting in every book. It is always something small and woolly and for a baby, and in forty years of novels no baby has ever received anything. There is no finished garment in the canon. It is the same eight inches of fluffy pink, forever. This is not a hobby. It is a prop, and it is doing exactly what props do in the theatre, which is give the audience something to look at while the real business happens somewhere else.

It is also, I note, the only thing that makes her harmless. Take away the wool and what you have is a woman with no occupation, an unlimited supply of time, a garden that overlooks the vicarage, and opinions about everyone.

The method

Her famous technique is the village parallel. Every stranger she meets reminds her of someone from home who did something dreadful: the chemist’s boy who mixed up the bottles, the housemaid and the arsenic, the man whose wife fell down perfectly good stairs, the pleasant fellow who turned out to have three other pleasant wives. She produces these, one per murder, like a conjuror doing scarves.

Stop and think about what she is telling you. This is a village of three hundred people, and by my count she is on first-name terms with roughly a dozen killers. Either St Mary Mead is the Sodom of the Home Counties, or all of those people had one thing in common, and she was standing next to it.

Then look at what she actually does. In A Murder Is Announced she gets her confession by hiding in a scullery and doing the voice of a dead woman, in the dark, to frighten the killer into breaking. In 4.50 from Paddington a friend sees a strangling from a train, the police decline to believe her, and Miss Marple calmly hires a professional to go and find the body — because she knows there is one, and she knows roughly where. In Nemesis a dead millionaire leaves her a sum of money on condition she goes and finds a body. She finds one. Efficient. In The Body in the Library she designs the trap herself, and the police are furniture.

An old lady doing voices in the dark to break a frightened person. A woman who always knows where the body is. In any other book that is the villain’s chapter. Here it is the bit where you’re supposed to clap.

Her own words

She says it in every book, patiently, to inspectors and nephews and girls in cardigans who wish she’d get to the point: it is always the least likely person. The quiet one. The one with a perfectly good reason to be in the house. The one nobody looks at, because looking at them would be absurd.

Now do the exercise. A village of three hundred, forty years, forty bodies. Who has been in every house? Who has stood over every corpse? Who has never once been asked where she was at a quarter to four, and has never once been asked what she is knitting?

She built the theory. She just never sat it in her own chair. And she is on record, more than once, as a woman who never trusts anybody and always expects the worst. I have heard that sentence before. It’s usually in an interview room, and the person saying it is asking for a solicitor.

The one witness

Agatha Christie, the only person who knew everything, died in 1976. Of natural causes. Which is what they said about everybody in St Mary Mead, right up until Jane arrived.

Sleeping Murder, the book in which Miss Marple takes her final bow, was published that same year, from a manuscript Christie had locked in a vault decades earlier. Which is what I would do too, if I knew something about a woman with that many nephews.

The prosecution rests

I concede the confessions. Every killer she names does confess, and every confession is true. But ask the question any investigator asks about a confession: who benefits? And the answer, every single time, is the elderly woman who gets thanked, gets driven home, and gets left entirely alone until the next one. Every solved case is another year of cover. There is no safer place to stand than at the end of an investigation, pointing.

I don’t say the case would hold. I say it has never been brought. The genre gave her the one immunity it gives nobody else, and she spent twelve novels explaining, to anyone who would listen, exactly how a person like that would get away with it.

Somebody should write that book. I have a folder. She would tell you that is exactly the sort of thing to watch for.