![]() Griselda, as I have said, is much younger than I am. ![]() ‘And she always knows every single thing that happens-and draws the worst inferences from it.’ ![]() ‘She’s the worst cat in the village,’ said Griselda. ‘‘Mrs Price Ridley, Miss Wetherby, Miss Hartnell, and that terrible Miss Marple. Griselda ticked them off on her fingers with a glow of virtue on her face. When the Vicar asks his wife, Griselda (a startlingly inappropriate name for such a spirited woman), how she’ll be spending the day, her reply triggers a wonderful foreshadowing of the presence of Miss Marple: The first scene opens with the primary narrator of the story, a rather put upon Vicar who is regretting marrying a very pretty woman, twenty years his junior and who lacks any of the qualities appropriate to a Vicar’s wife, pondering the appeal of the celibate life and trying to remember why he married this pretty young woman after knowing her for only twenty-four hours. I was completely wrong and I’m delighted to have been so. Perhaps it’s because I’ve only seen Miss Marple in TV series and in films but I expected her to be in the first scene in her first book, perhaps doing something punitive to delinquent plants in her garden while noting, out of the side of her eye, the arrival of a strange car at the vicarage. Sparkling virtual locked room mystery, filled with benevolent humour and illuminated by the first appearance of the formidable Miss Marple. ![]()
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