As an organiser of the 1990 Torquay Agatha Christie Centenary one of my tasks was to arrange and chair the Agatha Christie lectures. Anne Hart was one of my speakers. In my white tuxedo on stage in the crowded Grand Hotel Ballroom, I put in my monocle and assured her all English chairmen were not stuffed shirts, some were more like Bertie Wooster. She promptly got her first laugh by responding ""You remind me more of James Bond."" Over dinner afterwards I found her a most interesting companion. I had read her two books, originally titled The Life and Times of Miss Jane Marple (the present book) and The Life and Times of Hercule Poirot (now titled Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot). She wrote the Marple book in 1985.In her thirteen chapters she analyses and summarises the differing facts about Miss Jane Marple. The village of St Mary Mead; her career and her cases; her home, her friends and her maids; her life and her family - all the details garnered from the twelve books and twenty short stories. She finds the anomalies -the changing styles of her wardrobe from the terribly sedate to the more fashionable - her age (as with Poirot the author started her off with too categorical an age) - and some of the changes apparent in the supporting characters. It is a useful book of reference, reasonably priced, and very neatly bound.I do not see eye to eye with all her approach. For example, she says in Chapter 7 that Jane Marple ""was not the sensible, tweedy person or the jolly blunderer...in movies and on the stage"". Margaret Rutherford was woefully miscast in the four films made in Britain. But the stage versions were very different. My friend Barbara Miller was in a West End run of one of the Marple's at the Fortune theatre as were others I knew. I saw the play at least seven times, and it, and also the film versions with Helen Hayes and Angela Lansbury, were a very different kettle of fish to the Rutherford films. Not forgetting the inimitable Joan Hickson on BBC-TV, whom was told by Dame Agatha she would be ideal in the part. Perhaps some updating is necessary here?I would also have liked some more research conducted, for example where is St Mary Mead - ""twenty-five miles south of London and twelve miles equidistant from Market Basing and the coast at Loomouth."" In my column And Finally... in a previous issue I traced exactly where Dame Agatha staged the first murders in Evil Under The Sun. Are we now in Sussex or Surrey? Loomouth sounds very West Country. In 1990 we learnt that the Hotel Majestic in Body In The Library was the Imperial Hotel, Torquay. There was an End House being built when Peril at End House was written in 1932. There is one place where two trains pass going in the same direction from Newton Abbot towards Torquay for 4.50 From Paddington, the 1967 Marple story where this killing is seen from one train to another. Lt Col NTF Murphy, foremost authority on PG Wodehouse sites and districts, author of In Search Of Blandings has told me of his keen tracing of even the suburb of ""Valley Fields"" and the villa with the ornamental dogs at the door, so it can be done. Brown's Hotel in London's West End stages Bertram's Hotel weekends, as redolent of atmosphere as Istanbul's Pera Palace Hotel, in what had threatened to become yet another boring museum.
Posted at 12:00AM Monday 01 Jan 2007
