Satire: the use of humor, irony, exaggeration, or ridicule to expose and criticize people’s stupidity or vices, particularly in the context of contemporary politics and other topical issues.
Miss Marple is a quiet, placid, grey-haired, knitting-spinster, village resident of indeterminate, but mature, age. Don’t be deceived by this soothing, grandmotherly veneer. Marpalian urban philosophy offers a powerful and unsettling challenge to many well-established beliefs. Influential urban philosophy is not the exclusive remit of toga-wearing Greek orators or of indulgent, gourmet, metropolitan Belgian detectives. Marpalian thinking is philosophy from the grass-roots – literally the grass, specifically the abundant grass found in English country villages.
We return in this note to the English Detective School of Urban Philosophy. This blog (part of the CCI Big Thinkers series) introduces us to the profundities of this school and its three leading protagonists: Monsieur Hercule Poirot (the urban positivist), Miss Jane Marple (the urban sceptic), and Mr. Sherlock Holmes (one associated with all that is foggy and urban, but a philosopher who in practice sought to reconcile the Poirovian and Marpalian extremes).
We continue this series of three blogs here, with the thoughts of Miss Jane Marple. Miss Marple is best known to us through her biographer Agatha Christie. Most scholars proclaim the UK television series, Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple (1984 to 1992), starring Joan Hickson, as the definitive edition of her collected philosophical works¹.
Miss Marple provides a powerful corrective to urban bias and she also anticipates much of the work of 1960s urban activist Jane Jacobs.
In Murder at the Vicarage (1930) Miss Marple is described as an unassuming older woman:
“Her hair was usually described as white, occasionally grey, her face as pink and crinkled, and her teeth as ladylike. She was tall and thin and had very pretty china-blue eyes, which could look innocent or shrewd depending on one’s point of view.”
Too many murderers over the years allowed the unprepossessing appearance of Miss Marple to give them false security. They were always wrong. In The Body in the Library (1942), Miss Marple appears as, “an old lady with a sweet, placid spinsterish face, and a mind that has plumbed the depths of human iniquity and taken it all in the day’s work.”
In The Body in the Library (1942), we are also given a smattering of biographical details. At age 14, Miss Marple was given a treat by her uncle and aunt and stayed at Bertram’s Hotel in London, she had a shopping trip to the Army and Navy Grocery store, and a lunch with Strawberry Ice. Miss Marple’s history is quiet; as a spinster the only family complication is a nephew, and city-life was this half-forgotten dream of a trip from her teenage years. While Hercule Poirot was an urban dabbler, dashing from theatre to restaurant and exhibition to dinner party, from London to Baghdad, to Egypt, to the Orient Express, to Paris, and then back to London. Miss Marple is rooted to place. Miss Marple lives in St Mary Mead, about 25 miles south of London. It is a small village, whose shops and houses straggle a High Street between the Blue Boar pub and a railway station. Miss Marple investigates murders that occur in the village and the surrounding area. Over the forty years of Miss Marple’s active philosophical work,
“there occurred in St Mary Mead a total of sixteen murders – five by poisoning, two by shooting, two by drowning, two by strangling, and five by unidentified means – plus four attempts at murder by poisoning, smothering, and bashing on the head. In the same period there occurred five robberies, eight embezzlements, two series of blackmailing, several illegal impersonations, a case or two of poaching, and a number of crank phone calls, poison-pen letters, and criminal libels.”.
The practical reality of this murderous extravaganza (in one small English village) must surely be evidence is enough to dispel any lingering Poirovian prejudice that only urban life has the diversify, cosmopolitanism, and intelligence to justify philosophical engagement.
We cannot claim advantage or equivalence for every aspect of rural over urban life. There is one striking case in which Marpalian philosophy claims no advantage over Poirovianism. The English village between the 1920s and the 1960s was no centre of gastronomic pleasure. Recall in After the Funeral (1953), where Poirot and company dined off a Sole Veronique, followed by Escalope de Veau Milanaise, and finished with Poire Flambe with ice cream. In Murder at the Vicarage (1930) references to dining include, a “singularly moist and unpleasant dumplings” and a “partially cooked rice pudding”. Urban sophisticates, including Hercule Poirot, have tended to shun the village on account of the epicurean challenge within.
There is also a distinct anti-modernism associated with Marpalian philosophy that has raised some sceptical urban eyebrows. In The Body in the Library (1942) London intrudes into St Mary Mead in shocking fashion: “People come down from London and from the studios – you remember last July? Shouting and singing – the most terrible noise – everyone very drunk”. Salacious romance is not something of the rural: “several week-ends lately, he’s brought down a young woman with him – a platinum blonde.” In Murder at the Vicarage (1930) urban culture is met with blank indifference: “His poems have no capital letters in them, which is, I believe, the essence of modernity.” By the 1960s, modernity was intruding into St Mary Mead. In The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side (1962), from the Market Basing Road, Miss Marple could see a new housing development, comprising “rows of neat well-built houses, with their television masts and colourful doors and windows”. On first glance, “The people, too, looked unreal. The trousered young women, the rather sinister-looking young man and boys, the exuberant bosoms of the fifteen-year-old girls”. Miss Marple is not enthused and concludes, “it all looked terribly depraved”.
Is Marpalian philosophy irredeemably weakened by its failure to engage with trouser-wearing modern women? For Poirovians, the answer is evident: there is no better way to conduct philosophy than over a sumptuous dinner with trousered glamour. The Marpalian scorn of female trousers and modernity more generally, should not on closer reflection, be seen as a limiting aspect of Marpalian philosophy, but rather as a specific rejection of Poirovian obsession with surface glamour. While Miss Marple is no fan of trousered females, she doesn’t make a final judgement of the book by its cover, or woman by her leggy attire. We should, like Miss Marple, also engage with the deeper realities of human nature. In The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side, Miss Marple is not deterred by the supposed bosom-y depravity she views from a distance, and ventures into the new housing development. Therein Miss Marple makes an observation that epitomises her philosophy: “The new world was the same as the old. The houses were different, the streets were called Closes, the clothes were different, the voices were different, but the human beings were the same as they always had been. And though using slightly different phraseology, the subjects of conversation were the same.”
Once we accept the Marpalian insight that people are fundamentally the same, that good food, fine clothes, and urban residence make no fundamental difference to human nature, we can look at urban and rural philosophy in a more objective manner In cities, yes, there are more people and more firms so a greater range of potential interactions. But Marpalian philosophy makes the very valid point that in villages there is a greater ease and frequency of repeated interaction between people. In urban areas it is about quantity, in rural areas it is about quality.
In The Thirteen Problems (1928), Miss Marple makes this clear, “human nature is much the same everywhere, and, of course, one has opportunities of observing it at closer quarters in a village.” Living her life in St Mary’s Mead has given Miss Marple an “archive of village secrets filed away in her mind to be referred to.” As all human nature is readily observable in a village, as noted in The Body in the Library (1942): “Miss Marple has an interesting, though occasionally trivial, series of parallels from village life.” In Murer at the Vicarage (1930): “And then there was that matter of the changed cough drops, and the butchers wife’s umbrella….” In The Thirteen Problems (1928): “It reminds me of old Mr Hargraves who lived up at the Mount.” By drawing on lessons from these parallels Miss Marple is able to solve each murder that shakes St Mary Mead over the years. In Murder at the Vicarage (1930) Miss Marple’s nephew, Raymond West declares that St Mary Mead is a “stagnant pond” to which Miss Marple replies “Nothing, I believe, is so full of life under the microscope as a drop of water from a stagnant pool.“
Cities are hailed as an efficient mechanism to exchange information; lots of information is being produced in cities and lots of firms and workers are eager to obtain information. In New York there were 1,000 different advertising agencies in the southern half of Manhattan in the mid-2000s. One study found that productivity benefits existed for such firms that were located within 750 meters of each other. Where St Mary Mead lacks the numbers of New York, it compensates through the means of active networks of gossip among a tightly integrated village population. The delivery boys from the fishmonger have a useful function, “court girls and distribute the news of the latest felony, along with the kippers and the herrings around the village.” In The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side (1962) it is the maids who gossip and chat with other maids in the village who spread information. In The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side (1962) Briggs was “clipping [gardening] something quite close to the study and he heard the doctor ringing up the police station in Much Benham. Briggs told his daughter and his daughter mentioned it to the post-woman and she told me ([Mrs Bantry].” In The Body in the Library (1942) the body of a young woman discovered in the library at Gossington Hall at 7:15am. By 7:50am Miss Marple is aware of the crime and has started to investigate.
Jane Jacobs (1916 to 2006) is widely regarded to be one of the most influential urban philosophers of the twentieth century. Her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) had an enduring influence on debates about urban regeneration. For Jacobs, cities were complex organisms and couldn’t be managed by the arrogance of modernist planners. Among her many arguments were those related to crime and safety. Jacobs argued that the functioning of streets and sidewalks were key to keeping a city safe. It is not the police that keep public peace, but rather eyes and feet upon the street. Safe streets are those under constant observation by residents and constant utilization by residents and strangers to access stores, bars, and restaurants and public spaces. Jacobs’ 1961 book was influential, but Mis Marple got there first. In St Mary Mead the delivery boys and the maids were the eyes and feet upon the streets and the tightly integrated local community was the means by which gossip subsequently spread. In her 1961 book, Jane Jacobs extolled the virtues of the ‘public character’ which she defined as, “anyone who is in frequent contacts with a wide circle of people and who is sufficiently interested to make himself a public character.” A public character “is public, talks to lots of different people and news travels of sidewalk interest.” In 1961 Jane Jacobs suggested storekeepers or barkeepers made ideal public characters. Miss Marple spends the entirety of Murder at the Vicarage (1930) gardening and bird watching and observes most of the protagonists in the novel, as she notes, “Gardening is as good as a smoke screen and the habit of observing birds through powerful glasses can be called to account.” Miss Marple was an archetypal public character decades before Jacobs.
Poirovian philosophy scorned all that was rural (the food, reasonably so), but Marpalian philosophy makes a powerful case that cities and villages are different, not better and worse. While cities increase the quantity of interaction villages increase the quality of interaction, cities produce lots of information and those who consume information, villages are more efficient means of disseminating information. Today we hail Jane Jacobs for her 1961 book, but should acknowledge her debt to Marpalian philosophy. The feet and eyes on the street, the public characters that Jacobs extolled for bringing order to urban life were ever-present in St Mary Mead decades before. It was from St Mary Mead and Marpalian philosophy, not New York, that we owe the insight of Jane Jacobs.
Where Poirovian Philosophy extolled the urban at the expense of the rural, Marpalian philosophy makes the case that the rural offers complementary advantages. It is to the third pillar of the English School of Urban Detective Philosophy, Sherlock Holmes, that we must turn to finally reconcile the urban and the rural.
To be continued….
¹ Please do note, I have provided references from the Marpalian cannon, in the form of quotes or other facts, but not hyperlinks. Agatha Christie has only been outsold by the Bible and Shakespeare, so her works are available in many, many different editions globally. For the scholarly purists among you, I used a collected works published in the UK by Heron Books in 1977. I provide original UK publication dates for each book noted here.
