Just for a moment I hated Lymstock and its narrow boundaries, and its gossiping whispering women.
(Chapter 2)

‘I hope you find the devil who writes these soon. She murdered my wife as surely as if she’d put a knife into her.’
(Mr Symmington in Chapter 3 – Criminals in Christie are always maniacs, devils or fiends, or a ‘dangerous lunatic’, Chapter 5, or ‘A crafty, determined lunatic killer’, Chapter 7)

Nash nodded sympathetically. ‘Yes, it isn’t very pleasant to look upon these fellow creatures one meets as possible criminal lunatics.’
(Ditto, Chapter 6)

‘What kind of place is this for a man to come to to lie in the sun and heal his wounds? It’s full of festering poison, this place, and it looks as peaceful and as innocent as the Garden of Eden.’
(Jerry Burton appalled by what he is discovering)

‘But people have such evil minds. Yes, alas, such evil minds!’
(Miss Ginch)

‘It’s the first murder we’ve ever had in Lymstock. Excitement is terrific.’
(Hearty Aimée Griffith expressing the comic view which is never far away in Christie)

‘The Moving Finger’ is Agatha Christie’s third Miss Marple novel.

Synopsis

Jerry Burton

It’s a first-person narrative told by Jerry Burton. A fit young man, he was badly injured in a flying accident and, once he’d recovered, his doctor advised going somewhere very quiet for rest and recuperation. So he and his sister Joanna rented a cottage called Little Furze in the village of Lymstock, ‘a little provincial market town’. The charming old Victorian lady who owned it, Miss Emily Barton, moved into rooms in Lymstock.

Small town gossip

Having just finished reading some of E.F. Benson’s Mapp and Lucia novels, I was struck by the similarities, not of tone, style or intent – but of setting. A provincial village with a set of stock characters, even down to the way that morning is the time for everyone to head off to the High Street, bump into each other and have a good gossip.

‘That ought to give you time to pass the time of day with everyone in Lymstock.’
‘I have no doubt,’ I said, ‘that I shall have seen anybody who is anybody by then.’
For morning in the High Street was a kind of rendezvous for shoppers, when news was exchanged.

Just as in Lucia’s Riseholme where the catchphrase is ‘Any news?’ – as Inspector Nash explains about tiny little village communities:

‘Anything’s news in a place like this. You’d be surprised. If the dressmaker’s mother has got a bad corn everybody hears about it!’ (Chapter 5)

And here’s Aimée Griffith’s view:

‘Oh, I dare say you don’t hear all the gossip that goes around. I do! I know what people are saying. Mind you, I don’t for a minute think there’s anything in it – not for a minute! But you know what people are – if they can say something ill-natured, they do!’… Aimée Griffith gave her jolly laugh. ‘You’re shocked, Mr Burton, at hearing what our gossiping little town thinks. I can tell you this – they always think the worst!’

I was struck when I came across Mr Pye using the expression ‘village Parliament’ to describe the daily morning meeting of villages in the high street to exchange gossip:

‘Not joining our village Parliament? We are all agog over the news. Murder! Real Sunday newspaper murder in our midst!’

Because it echoes Benson’s novel, Queen Lucia, in which characters refer half a dozen time to exactly the same morning meeting of villagers on their green as ‘the morning parliament’, ‘the parliament on the green’ and so on. Coincidence of not just concept but precise terminology.

Poison pen letters

As to the plot, first of all we are introduced to the middle class inhabitants of the village and some of their servants, in an enjoyably leisurely way, about 15 named characters in all. Fairly early on Jerry receives an anonymous poison pen letter claiming his sister, Joanna, is not his sister at all and that he’s living in sin with his mistress masquerading as his sister. Jerry shows it to Joanna, they have a laugh and then burn it in the fireplace.

But over the next few chapters they learn that almost everyone in the village has received one of these letters – a type-written envelope containing a message made entirely from words cut out of an old textbook and pasted into paper to make poisonous accusations, nearly all of a sexual nature.

Suicide

So far, so shedding an unexpected light on the dark underside of a small tightly-knit rural community. What drastically changes the narrative is when the querulous wife of the village’s dried-up solicitor, Mrs Symmington, commits suicide. The note she left suggests it was in response to the accusations contained in one of these letters and when the letter she’d scrunched up into a ball is examined, it claims that the second of her two children by the lawyer is not in fact his i.e. that she had an affair.

The cops

So the police, in the form of Superintendent Nash, are called in and Nash requests help from a specialist in these kinds of letters, an Inspector Graves who comes down from London specially. Suddenly all the nice characters we’ve met to date acquire a nimbus of suspicion.

Megan Hunter?

There’s a fairly big red herring or storyline which is that the Symmingtons have a step-daughter – Megan Symmington was Mrs Symmington’s daughter by her first marriage, by a Captain Hunter who was a wrong ‘un and quickly despatched leaving her holding the baby who would grow up to become Megan Symmington, 20-years-old at the time of the narrative. Megan is tall and clumsy, gauche, unhappy and angry because she knows she is simply not wanted in the Symmington household.

Jerry and Joanna feel sorry for her and so, in the aftermath of her mother’s suicide, they step in and offer to look after her, leaving the Symmington household’s governess, the stunningly attractive but commonplace Elsie Holland, to concentrate on looking after the bereaved husband and their two boys.

Earlier in the story, Jerry had bumped into her in the street and they’d walked for a bit and Megan had confessed that she hates everyone, because of her profound sense of alienation and unwantedness. Could the poison pen writer be her?

Miss Barton?

Later Jerry has a slight argument with old Miss Barton who’s rented them the cottage they’re staying in. Remember how in Murder Is Easy, the killer turned out a harmless little old lady, well… Miss Barton tells Jerry that she’s never received one of these horrid letters but later on the police inspector tells Jerry this was a lie…

Miss Ginch?

And then he goes to the estate agents about his rental and discovers that Mr Symmington’s dried-up 40-year-old secretary, Miss Ginch, has quit her job with him to work at the estate agents and seems to take a gleeful delight in the mayhem being caused by the letters. So maybe she wrote them!?

Elsie Holland?

The Symmingtons employ a stunningly beautiful young woman, Elsie Holland, as a governess to their two boys, Colin and Brian.

Dr Griffiths

That nice young but harassed Dr Griffiths. At first Jerry likes him, he is a widely read and interesting young chap, but then comes to realise that he also has more access to people’s secrets than anyone else in the village. And behaves increasingly nervously as if he knows something or has done something…

The second death

So far so entertainingly puzzling and challenging as the reader shares in Jerry’s conversations with all the different characters, picking out throwaway remarks, wondering whodunnit. But the plot thickens considerably when there is a second death and this time it is no accident, this time it is murder!

A maid at Symmington’s house, Agnes Woddell, rings up her former superior and mentor, Partridge, who is housekeeper at Little Furze, in a tizzy and wanting help. Partridge can’t get out of her what the problem is and agrees to meet her but Agnes never turns up. Next day she is found brutally murdered and stuffed into the broom cupboard under the stairs. Jerry and the cops quickly conclude that she must have seen who delivered the fatal letter by hand to the Symmingtons house, which pushed Mrs Symmington over the brink into suicide – she’d come to connect someone she knew walking up the path and delivering something at the letter box (everyone else was out of the house at the time) – and that person – the Poison Pen writer must themselves have realised that Agnes knew and could identify her (everyone thinks it’s a woman), and so snuck back a week later, when the rest of the household was out, and murdered her!

At which point the atmosphere thickens and everyone becomes a suspect, quizzed by the police about their whereabouts at the time of the murder, with Jerry kept informed by the police superintendent of developments, who also asks if Jerry could keep his ear open and quiz villagers, with a view to turning up more evidence.

In other words, following the Hercule Poirot rulebook, which is to get people talking and keep them talking, until they slip up. Combined with that other Poirot technique, which is finding psychological consistency, identifying the kind of person who would write these letters and then go on to kill to protect themselves…

So life goes on in this harmless little village with a new tinge of paranoia, which verges slightly on the realm of horror:

There was a half-scared, half-avid gleam in almost everybody’s eye. Neighbour looked at neighbour… Somewhere, then, in Lymstock, walking down the High Street, shopping, passing the time of day, was a person who had cracked a defenceless girl’s skull and driven a sharp skewer home to her brain. And no one knew who that person was. As I say, the days went on in a kind of dream. I looked at everyone I met in a new light, the light of a possible murderer.

Enter Miss Marple

And it’s only here, on page 180 of this 250-page book, that Miss Marple enters, a guest invited to tea by the vicar, along with jerry, who is introduced to her for the first time… And after a few pages demonstrating her fondness for making analogies to characters in her own village, she drops out of the narrative altogether for the next 30 pages. Only 25 pages or so from the end does she reappear, after the police have arrested the person they think responsible.

And it now, in the final stretches, that Miss Marple, of course, proves everybody wrong, organising an elaborate hoax which the police stake out in order to catch the murderer red-handed.

Miss Marple dazzlingly solves the case, and the novel ends with the baddie caught and arrested, a flurry of engagements, and quite a funny joke in the last line. Very slick and enjoyable entertainment all round.

Cast

• Jerry Burton – narrator, severe back injury in a flying accident and so ‘an invalid hobbling about on two sticks’
• Joanna Burton – his sister, suave, independent, fond of brief love affairs, blonde
• Old Miss Emily Barton – permanently pink and excited like Dresden China
  • Florence Elford – Miss Barton’s faithful parlour-maid, ‘a tall, raw-boned, fierce-looking woman’
  • Partridge – Miss Barton’s maid
  • Beatrice – the daily help
  • Old Adams – the gardener
• Mr Richard Symmington the lawyer, thin and dry
  • old Miss Ginch – his lady clerk – ‘forty at least, with pince-nez and teeth like a rabbit’ – ‘She had frizzy hair and simpered’
  • Agnes Woddell – maid
  • Rose – the cook, ‘a plump pudding-faced woman of forty’
• Mrs Mona Symmington – his querulous bridge-playing wife; he is her second husband after she divorced the not-to-be-mentioned Captain Hunter – ‘a small anaemic woman, fadedly pretty, who talked in a thin melancholy voice of servant difficulties and her health’ – ‘That anaemic middle-aged prettiness concealed, I thought, a selfish, grasping nature’
• Megan Hunter – Symmington’s step-daughter – ‘a tall awkward girl, and although she was actually
  twenty, she looked more like a schoolgirlish sixteen. She had a shock of untidy brown hair, hazel-green eyes, a thin bony face, and an unexpectedly charming one-sided smile. Her clothes were drab and unattractive and she usually had on lisle-thread stockings with holes in them’
• Elsie Holland – the Symmingtons’ nursery governess – stunningly beautiful
  • Colin and Brian, Symmington’s two young boys
• Dr Owen Griffith – the dark, melancholy doctor – ‘dark, ungainly, with awkward ways of moving and deft, very gentle hands. He had a jerky way of talking and was rather shy’
• Aimée Griffith – his sister who was big and hearty – runs the Girl Guides – ‘had all the positive assurance her brother lacked. She was a handsome woman in a masculine weather-beaten way,
  with a deep voice’
• the Reverend Caleb Dane Calthrop – the vicar – a scholarly absent-minded elderly man, ‘s a being more remote from everyday life than anyone I have ever met. His existence was in his books and in his study’
• Mrs Maud Dane Calthrop – his erratic eager-faced wife, ‘quite terrifyingly on the spot. Though she seldom gave advice and never interfered, yet she represented to the uneasy consciences of the village the Deity personified’ – ‘her startling resemblance to a greyhound’
• Mr Pye of Prior’s End – rich dilettante – ‘an extremely ladylike plump little man, devoted to his petit point chairs, his Dresden shepherdesses and his collection of period furniture’ – gay?
  • Prescott – his cook
  • Mrs Prescott – his house parlour-maid
• Mrs Mudge – the butcher’s wife
• Jennifer Clark – barmaid at the ‘Three Crowns’
• young Fred Rendell from the fish shop
• Sergeant Parkins – village cop
• Bert Rundle – the village constable
• Mrs Cleat – the village witch – ‘Likes to show off. Goes out to gather herbs and things at the full of the moon and takes care that everybody in the place knows about it’
• Colonel Appleby – ‘that awful old bore’
• Miss Jane Marple – ‘That’s my expert,’ said Mrs Dane Calthrop. ‘Jane Marple. Look at her well. I tell you, that woman knows more about the different kinds of human wickedness than anyone I’ve ever known’

The police

• Superintendent Nash – ‘I liked him at first sight. He was a top quality criminal investigator. Tall, with a military way, he looked tranquil and objective, besides being very simple’
• Inspector Graves – an expert on anonymous letter cases, come down from London to help the local police

In London

• Marcus Kent – Jerry’s doctor, who told him to go to some little place in the country to rest and recover
• Mirotin – Joanna’s dressmaker – ‘Mirotin is, in the flesh, an unconventional and breezy woman of forty-five, Mary Grey’

Feminism

In most of the Christie books I’ve read to date, her feminist characters are figures of fun. Not here. Aimée Griffith is given some fiercely feminist lines that instantly reminded me of the furious denunciations on Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas.

‘I should have said Megan is at the age when a girl wants to enjoy herself – not to work.’
Aimée flushed and said sharply, ‘You’re like all men – you dislike the idea of women competing. It is incredible to you that women should want a career. It was incredible to my parents. I was anxious to study for a doctor. They would not hear of paying the fees. But they paid them readily for Owen. Yet I should have made a better doctor than my brother.’
‘I’m sorry about that,’ I said. ‘It was tough on you. If one wants to do a thing–’
She went on quickly.
‘Oh, I’ve got over it now. I’ve plenty of willpower. My life is busy and active. I’m one of the happiest people in Lymstock. Plenty to do. But I go up in arms against the silly old-fashioned prejudice that woman’s place is always the home.’
‘I’m sorry if I offended you, I said. I had had no idea that Aimée Griffith could be so vehement.

Theology

Despite having created countless vicars, and dwelling on death at great length, and endlessly invoking the concept of ‘evil’, and despite Christie herself being a Church of England Christian, her books contain surprisingly little theology. That made Jerry Burton’s little outburst stick out the more. Here he is getting cross with old Miss Barton as they discuss the author of the poison pen letters and Miss Barton says maybe they were sent by Providence to punish the villagers.

‘No, no, Mr Burton, you misunderstand me. I’m not talking of the misguided creature who wrote them – someone quite abandoned that must be. I mean that they have been permitted – by Providence! To awaken us to a sense of our shortcomings.’
‘Surely,’ I said, ‘the Almighty could choose a less unsavoury weapon.’
Miss Emily murmured that God moved in a mysterious way.
‘No,’ I said. ‘There’s too much tendency to attribute to God the evils that man does of his own free will. I might concede you the Devil. God doesn’t really need to punish us, Miss Barton. We’re so very busy punishing ourselves.’
(Chapter 3)

Class in England

‘I shouldn’t have thought one of these bucolic women down here would have had the brains,’ I said.
Graves coughed. ‘I haven’t made myself plain, I’m afraid. Those letters were written by an educated woman.’
‘What, by a lady?’
The word slipped out involuntarily. I hadn’t used the term ‘lady’ for years. But now it came automatically to my lips, re-echoed from days long ago, and my grandmother’s faint unconsciously arrogant voice saying, ‘Of course, she isn’t a lady, dear.’
Nash understood at once. The word lady still meant something to him.
‘Not necessarily a lady,’ he said. ‘But certainly not a village woman. They’re mostly pretty illiterate down here, can’t spell, and certainly can’t express themselves with fluency.’
(Chapter 3)

The slow impoverishment of the rentier class

Late Victorian and Edwardian fiction is full of posh ladies who live off unearned income deriving from trust funds or investments in government ‘consols’. See the novels of E.M. Forster or my little philippic against the rentier class in my review of Mrs Craddock by Somerset Maugham (1902).

The point is that the Great Depression dealt this whole lifestyle a blow and began the process whereby all those lucrative stocks and shares and annual incomes began to decline and the carefree, arty lifestyle along with it – plus the kicker of higher taxes. Here’s old Miss Emily’s loyal servant, Florence, complaining about it, starting with Joanna Burton saying Miss Barton put her house on the market.

‘Well, Miss Barton wanted to let the house. She put it down at the house agents.’
‘Forced to it,’ said Florence. ‘And she living so frugal and careful. But even then, the government can’t leave her alone! Has to have its pound of flesh just the same.’ [i.e. increased taxes]
I shook my head sadly.
‘Plenty of money there was in the old lady’s time,’ said Florence. ‘And then they all died off one after another, poor dears. Miss Emily nursing of them one after the other. Wore herself out she did, and always so patient and uncomplaining. But it told on her, and then to have worry about money on top of it all! Shares not bringing in what they used to, so she says, and why not, I should like to know? They ought to be ashamed of themselves. Doing down a lady like her who’s got no head for figures and can’t be up to their tricks.’
‘Practically everyone has been hit that way,’ I said, but Florence remained unsoftened.
‘It’s all right for some as can look after themselves, but not for her. She needs looking after, and as long as she’s with me I’m going to see no one imposes on her or upsets her in any way. I’d do anything for Miss Emily.’

This, in a little village mode, is the same process of impoverishment of the old leisured class which Evelyn Waugh laments in Brideshead Revisited.

Mr Symmington, too, was a very clever lawyer, and had helped Miss Barton to get some money back from the Income Tax which she would never have known about.

Incidentally, neither Jerry nor his sister appear to have jobs. They just live a charmed and pleasant life, attended by servants catering to all their needs, without lifting a finger – an amount of pure leisure time we 21st century wage slaves can only dream of.

NB Christie’s lament for the loss of the old leisured life, and her resentment at the postwar Labour government and its introduction of ruinously high taxes, are all given full expression in her 1948 novel, ‘Taken at the Flood’.

Rise of the unconscious

I’ve mentioned many times how I’ve noticed a slow but steady increase in references to Freudian notions of the unconscious and the unconscious mind in Christie’s novels as the 1920s and ’30s progressed, matching the spread of Freudian ideas through the wider culture. More of the same, here:

Somewhere behind my conscious mind, a queer uneasiness was growing. It was connected in some way with the phrase that Joanna had used, ‘a week exactly’. I ought, I dare say, to have put two and two together earlier. Perhaps, unconsciously, my mind was already suspicious. Anyway, the leaven was working now. The uneasiness was growing – coming to a head.

I think that even then, there were pieces of the puzzle floating about in my mind. I believe that if I had given my mind to it, I would have solved the whole thing then and there. Otherwise why did those fragments tag along so persistently?

How much do we know at any time? Much more, or so I believe, than we know we know! But we cannot break through to that subterranean knowledge. It’s there, but we cannot reach it… I lay on my bed, tossing uneasily, and only vague bits of the puzzle came to torture me. There was a pattern, if only I could get hold of it….

Later, Jerry shares some more bucket psychiatry, of the kind you read in magazines in GP waiting rooms.

‘She’s rather ‘queer’ in some ways – a grim spinster – the sort of person who might have religious mania.’
‘This isn’t religious mania – or so you told me Graves said.’
‘Well, sex mania. They’re very closely tied up together, I understand. She’s repressed and respectable, and has been shut up here with a lot of elderly women for years.’

The central idea, which became so popular, that it’s bad to ‘repress’ strong urges because if you try, they come out in other, generally bad, ways.

Later, as it happens, Christie uses the name Freud for, I think, the first time in her oeuvre:

I closed my eyes. I considered the four people, these strangely unlikely people, in turn: Gentle, frail little Emily Barton? What points were there actually against her? A starved life? Dominated and repressed from early childhood? Too many sacrifices asked of her? Her curious horror of discussing anything ‘not quite nice’? Was that actually a sign of inner preoccupation with just these themes? Was I getting too horribly Freudian? (Chapter 6)

Gay

Homosexuality was, of course, illegal, so authors had to find coded ways to refer to gay or lesbian characters. Quite a few mannish women crop up in Christie’s novels who she may have been implying were lesbians. Fewer gay men. Is the following passage about homosexuality? Joanna and Jerry are discussing the gender of the poison pen writer.

‘They are sure it is a woman, aren’t they?’
‘You don’t think it’s a man?’ I exclaimed incredulously.
‘Not – not an ordinary man – but a certain kind of man. I’m thinking, really, of Mr Pye.’
‘So Pye is your selection?’
‘Don’t you feel yourself that he’s a possibility? He’s the sort of person who might be lonely – and unhappy – and spiteful. Everyone, you see, rather laughs at him. Can’t you see him secretly hating all the normal happy people, and taking a queer, perverse, artistic pleasure in what he was doing?’
‘Graves said a middle-aged spinster.’
‘Mr Pye,’ said Joanna, ‘is a middle-aged spinster.’
‘A misfit,’ I said slowly.
‘Very much so. He’s rich, but money doesn’t help. And I do feel he might be unbalanced. He is, really, rather a frightening little man.’
(Chapter 5)

And police inspector Nash’s view:

‘I don’t think men wrote the letters – in fact, I’m sure of it – always excepting our Mr Pye, that is to say, who’s got an abnormally female streak in his character…’

Bookish

In novels, I have noticed, anonymous letters of a foul and disgusting character are never shown, if possible, to women. It is implied that women must at all cost be shielded from the shock it might give their delicate nervous systems. I am sorry to say it never occurred to me not to show the letter to Joanna. I handed it to her at once.

‘She despised them, you know, for not getting married, and yet so arranged their lives that it was practically impossible for them to meet anybody. I believe Emily, or perhaps it was Agnes, did have some kind of affair with a curate. But his family wasn’t good enough and Mamma soon put a stop to that!’
‘It sounds like a novel,’ said Joanna.

Presently Nash said that he was going to interview Rose once more. I asked him, rather diffidently, if I might come too. Rather to my surprise he assented cordially.
‘I’m very glad of your co-operation, Mr Burton, if I may say so.’
‘That sounds suspicious,’ I said. ‘In books when a detective welcomes someone’s assistance, that someone is usually the murderer.’
(Chapter 5)

Slang

‘It’s funny, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘Some people have lots of looks and absolutely no S.A. That girl hasn’t. It seems such a pity.’

As in previous novels, SA stands for Sex Appeal, a phrase first used in the early 1900s but which became much more common with the spread of moving pictures in the 1920s, as well as the tremendous growth in advertising which, from that day to this, routinely relies on associating a product with youth and vitality and sexiness.

Credit

‘The Moving Finger’ by Agatha Christie was published by the Collins Crime Club in June 1943.

Related links

• The Moving Finger online (PDF)
• Agatha Christie website

Related reviews

• Agatha Christie reviews
• 1940s reviews