Marple Begins: A Double Bluff
Review of the William Morrow Paperbacks Kindle eBook edition (2009) of the Collins Crime Club hardcover original (1930)

“I rather like Miss Marple,” I said. “She has, at least, a sense of humour.”
“She’s the worst cat in the village,” said Griselda. “And she always knows every single thing that happens—and draws the worst inferences from it.”
Griselda, as I have said, is much younger than I am. At my time of life, one knows that the worst is usually true.

Miss Marple is a white-haired old lady with a gentle, appealing manner—Miss Wetherby is a mixture of vinegar and gush. Of the two Miss Marple is much the more dangerous.

Miss Marple is not the type of elderly lady who makes mistakes. She has got an uncanny knack of being always right.

I wondered very much what exactly it was that Miss Marple wished to talk over. Of all the ladies in my congregation, I considered her by far the shrewdest. Not only does she see and hear practically everything that goes on, but she draws amazingly neat and apposite deductions from the facts that come under her notice.

I read quite a lot of Agatha Christie in the old days but those were primarily the Hercule Poirot stories and novels, and I somehow overlooked the Miss Marple books. Now they are another chance to binge on some lighter cozy mystery reading in between my various one-offs of literary fiction and such. The Marple books mostly take place in various English village settings and The Murder at the Vicarage is in Miss Marple's own community of St. Mary Mead.

In fact, Miss Marple is one of the primary witnesses as she is the neighbour of the local vicar and his wife. Colonel Protheroe, a not-well-liked church figure, is found murdered by gunshot in the vicar's study, supposedly having written a note timed at 6:20pm with a broken and stopped clock showing 6:22pm near at hand. No one heard the shot and everyone seems to have an alibi for the apparent time of death. But then the village doctor says the death must have occurred much earlier. To add to the confusion, various suspects start to confess to the crime. Inspector Slack finds that Miss Marple is the observant witness that he needs to solve the crime.

“The point is,” she said, “that one must provide an explanation for everything. Each thing has got to be explained away satisfactorily. If you have a theory that fits every fact—well, then, it must be the right one. But that’s extremely difficult."

“I know that in books it is always the most unlikely person. But I never find that rule applies in real life. There it is so often the obvious that is true."

The Murder at the Vicarage was a great start to a Miss Marple binge and in its own way is a whodunnit classic together with some of Christie's unique mystery solutions such as those of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (Poirot #4 - 1926) and Murder on the Orient Express (Poirot #10 - 1934).

Confusion for Completists
The title of this edition describes The Murder at the Vicarage as Miss Marple #1, but some lists, including the Goodreads Miss Marple Listopia, count it as Miss Marple #2 with the short story collection The Thirteen Problems (1932) counted as #1 only because some of those stories appeared in 1927.

See cover at https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/b/bf/The_Murder_at_the_Vicarage_First_...
The front cover of the original 1930 Collins Crime Club (UK) edition. Image sourced from Wikipedia.

Trivia and Links
The Murder in the Vicarage was adapted twice for English language television. Both of those are reasonably faithful to the original plot. I did not find any free trailers or postings of either of them, but they are both available on the Britbox streaming service here in Canada.

The first adaptation was as part of the BBC's Miss Marple (1984-1992) series as Season 2 Episode 2 in 1986 which starred Joan Hickson as Miss Marple.

The second adaptation was as part of ITV's Agatha Christie’s Marple (2004-2013) reboot series as Season 1 Episode 2 in 2004 which starred Geraldine McEwan as Miss Marple.

There is a French language adaptation for the Les petits meurtres d'Agatha Christie [French: The Little Murders of Agatha Christie] (2009 - ongoing) series. The episode based The Murder in the Vicarage was Season 2 Episode 14 L'Affaire Protheroe (2016).This series does not feature a Miss Marple character and instead has a police detective and a reporter as the leads. The plots are transplanted to France and are considerably changed from the originals. ( )

Another good Miss Marple story, in the usual style. The narrator was especially good, although I can never decide if I like male or female readers best for Agatha Christie audiobooks. I was pretty sure I knew who the murderer was, using my new technique of solving Miss Marple stories, but once again I was way off. I had to console myself with having correctly figured out a minor element of the story. In all, a thoroughly good book. ( )

Murder at the Vicarage - Christie
Audio performance by Richard E. Grant
4 star

A classic Agatha Christie, this is Miss Marple’s debut. I tried listening to Joan Hickson reading this one, but as much as I loved her in the screen role, she wasn’t right for voicing this book. The first person narrator of the book is the Reverend Leonard Clement. This is a relatively new (2013) recording of a book full of the usual attitudes and social conventions of the 1930’s. Also as usual, I couldn’t guess who-dunnit. ( )

January 2017 review: Just as good this time around :)

June 2014 review:
Richard E. Grant did a fine job narrating this Christie classic, the first Miss Marple book. His Irish accent for the artist was especially good (at least to this American's ears).

I had read this (more than once) in paperback, but although parts of it were familiar, I didn't recall the solution, so this audiobook version really held my attention! One thing I particularly liked was the way the vicar (who is the first person narrator of the book) talked about his wife and parish duties. He was a much more well-rounded personality than you typically find in Christie's Poirot stories. ( )

I can't imagine reading this book before Miss Marple was a household name in the mystery world. Christie does her usual red herrings around the murder itself, but then she also spreads the red herrings around, so not only don't we know who the murderer is, but we don't who the detective is! We don't really figure out that it's Marple until about 80% of the way into the book. Christie was a genius, and this book is brilliant. ( )