Murder at the Vicarage - Agatha Christie [100]
The domestics in St Mary Mead are a dim lot, and rather unsympathetically described by Mrs Christie. This may be because she wishes her readers not to consider them as ‘real people’ and therefore potential suspects, but you cannot help observing that Mary, the vicar’s all-purpose servant, is presented as a truculent dim-wit and an appalling cook, that the artist, Lawrence Redding, describes his cleaning woman as ‘practically a half-wit, as far as I can make out’, and that Gladys, kitchen-maid at the Old Hall, is ‘more like a shivering rabbit than anything human’. It should also be noted that Mrs Christie, like the Almighty, helps those who help themselves. The vicar is, for the most part, the essence of Christian charity, but he is prone to make cynical remarks about the ‘thorough-going humanitarian’ and to sneer at Dr Haydock’s sympathy for what the vicar calls ‘a lame dog of any kind’. Sentiments more Christiean than Christian. The police in Agatha Christie novels are not always the comic incompetent butts of the private detective, but Inspector Slack (who also appears in two short stories and in the 1942 novel, The Body in the Library) is a satirically characterized stupid police officer disliked by all, rude and over-bearing, and foolhardy enough to allow his contempt for Miss Marple’s suggestions to show.
There is no formula by which you can forecast guilt in the works of Agatha Christie. Nevertheless, for some years after the collapse of the novelist’s marriage to Archie Christie, her readers would do well to cast a wary eye upon any handsome young men in the novels, while keeping in mind the fact that resemblances to Colonel Christie do not automatically stamp a character as the murderer!
On 16 December 1949, nineteen years after the novel’s first publication, Agatha Christie’s Murder at the Vicarage, dramatized by Moie Charles and Barbara Toy, was produced in London at the Playhouse or, as it was tautologically called at the time, the Playhouse Theatre. (The Playhouse still stands, at the Thames Embankment end of Northumberland Avenue.)
A reasonably faithful and straightforward adaptation of the novel, Murder at the Vicarage simplifies the original plot somewhat, and alters the ending, though not the murderer’s identity, in the interests of dramatic effect. The play is set, not in the 1930 of the novel, but in ‘the present time’, i.e. 1949, with references to American airmen being stationed in the village during the war.
With Barbara Mullen as Miss Marple, Reginald Tate (who also directed the play) as Lawrence Redding, Jack Lambert as the Vicar, and Genine Graham as his wife, Griselda, Murder at the Vicarage had a reasonably successful run of four months, and later became popular with repertory companies and amateurs. A production at the Savoy Theatre in the West End of London in 1975, with Barbara Mullen returning to her role of Miss Marple, and Derek Bond as the Vicar, ran for two years.
A television adaptation in two episodes was produced by BBC TV, the first part being shown on Christmas Day 1986, with Joan Hickson as Miss Marple.
This essay was adapted from Charles Osborne’s The Life and Crimes of Agatha Christie: A Biographical Companion to the Works of Agatha Christie (1982, rev. 1999). Mr. Osborne was born in Brisbane in 1927. He is known internationally as an authority on opera, and has written a number of books on musical and literary subjects, among them The Complete Operas of Verdi (1969); Wagner and His World (1977); and W.H. Auden: The Life of a Poet (1980). An addict of crime fiction and the world’s leading authority on Agatha Christie, Charles Osborne adapted the Christie plays Black Coffee (Poirot); Spider’s Web; and The Unexpected Guest into novels. He lives in London.
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