On a different kind of spinster – Nicola Upson in TLS:

‘“Miss Marple insinuated herself so quietly into my life that I hardlynoticed her arrival”, Agatha Christie wrote in her autobiography, beautifully encapsulating not just the character’s creation, but the subtle, unshowy way in which this most atypical of detectives has earned – and kept – her place in readers’ affections. Mark Aldridge’s latest Christie study, Marple: Expert on wickedness, explores every aspect of the character from her first appearance in a short story of the 1920s, through twelve novels and a vast number of stage, screen and radio adaptations, eventually coming full circle to the short story, this time as a collection written by contemporary crime writers in her honour. He approaches Miss Marple with the same affection, insight and endearing obsessiveness that made his earlier study of Poirot (2022) so informative and entertaining.’

(…)

‘Throughout her long career, Marple’s superpower – and surely one of the reasons she’s so loved – is to maintain a faith in human nature while in no way ding herself to the wickedness of which it’s capable. Aldridge reminds us that Christie, too, saw herself as a lifelong single woman in the early days following her divorce, suggesting that “Miss Marple was an indication of her optimism for this new course of her life”; in fact, the first full-length Marple novel, The Murder at the Vicarage (1930) would be the only one that Christie would write before marrying for the second time.’

(…)

‘What does emerge very strongly, and quite shockingly, through Aldridge’s book is how consistently Christie has been damned with faint praise over the years. “Seldom can dear old Agatha’s computerised tales have been accorded such Rolls Royce treatment”, the Daily Telegraph scoffed in 1987 after the BBC broadcast of At Bertram’s Hotel; or, in the TLS, “It is a pleasure to read an author so nicely conscious of the limitations of what she is attempting”. One of the achievements of Aldridge’s book is to undermine this perception, showing the debt that all crime writers owe to Christie, not just for her creative ingenuity but also for the way in which her work has established a brand and created an appetite for detective stories across many different media.’

Read the article here.

Wickedness and faith. Without faith the refusal to be blind to the wickedness of mankind could easily become cynicism.

I was a hungry Agatha Christie reader in my early teens. And she might as well be underestimated. Something that happens more often to crime writers. Think of Simenon.