Nobody Knows Any More Who Anyone Is
Notes on "A Murder Is Announced"
(No serious spoilers for any Christie novels)
A Murder Is Announced, first published in 1950, is in many respects a typical Golden Age murder mystery. It takes place in a lovely English village, among the rural middle class, with a closed circle of suspects. The tone is relatively light, although it becomes noticeably darker and more serious towards the end. The central crime is somewhat convoluted and improbable, though not to the point of threatening the suspension of disbelief, and is solved by an amateur sleuth - Miss Marple. Problems of timing and location are much to the fore.
It is also, in my view, one of Agatha Christie’s best novels; my favourite of the twelve full-length Miss Marple titles. It arguably marks the end of Christie’s own golden period, which for my money started in 1930 with The Murder At The Vicarage, the first Miss Marple. There were still strong stories after 1950, even some classics. I am very fond of 1953’s After The Funeral and 1967’s Endless Night - a creepy and well-crafted thriller that experiments with the form in a way that is remarkable for a woman who was then in her late seventies. But the overall picture in those last decades is one of gradual decline.
A Murder Is Announced, however, stands with the best of the classic-era Christies. It is cleverly clued and entertainingly told. It has one of my favourite bits of detection in all Christie. Miss Marple is able to parse the meaning of a vitally important but ambiguous phrase - “She wasn’t there!” - spoken by a character who is now dead and so unable to clarify the meaning, by determining which word was emphasised. Such a neat bit of work is perfectly in line with Miss Marple’s character and her particular form of intelligence, because what makes her a great detective is that she has spent a lifetime paying attention to the speech of her friends, neighbours and acquaintances.
The only real misstep is the character of Mitzi, the housekeeper of Little Paddocks and a displaced person from the German occupation of Europe. who is treated as a figure of fun and occasionally contempt by both characters and author, in a way that is very jarring. It is quite shocking that only five years after the Second World War, a traumatised victim of the Nazis, who is strongly implied to have had close family members murdered by the Gestapo, should be included as comic relief, a stock “funny foreigner” of the type that Christie generally avoided (in fact she often used Poirot to gently mock contemporary anti-continental prejudices). It is a reminder of the less pleasant aspects of the gentle old England on which it is so easy to look back with rose-tinted spectacles.
*
The set-up is relatively straightforward. In the village of Chipping Cleghorn, friends and acquaintances of Letitia Blacklock are surprised to see an advertisement in the local paper stating that a murder will be committed at her home - Little Paddocks - at 6.30pm that day. A number of them accordingly assemble, and sure enough at the appointed time the lights go out and a somewhat theatrical hold-up, perpetrated by a masked stranger, takes place. But when the shooting starts, it is the stick-up artist himself who ends up dead; the only other injury is to Letitia Blacklock, bleeding from one ear.
The victim is identified as one Rudi Scherz, a Swiss man working a nearby hotel. The police duly investigate, working initially on the assumption that Blacklock was the target and that the stranger’s death was an accident. While making inquiries at the hotel, Inspector Craddock runs into Miss Marple, who inevitably becomes involved in the investigation. The case seems to turn on Letitia Blacklock’s position as the legatee of her former employer, Randall Goedler. Goedler is dead and his wife, Belle, is now dying. Blacklock will inherit Goedler’s money after Belle’s death - but if she had predeceased Belle, the money would have gone to Goedler’s only other relations, his long-lost twin niece and nephew, Pip and Emma, born abroad and unknown to the Goedlers or Letitia Blacklock. Miss Marple and Craddock wonder whether Pip and/or Emma might be in Chipping Cleghorn, under an assumed identity. Possible candidates include Philippa Haymes, a young war-widow lodging at Little Paddocks, and Patrick and Julia Simmons, distant cousins of Letitia who are also living there. Another possible suspect is Edmund Swettenham, a socialist writer living with his mother (the young political extremist whose flirtation with Fascism or Marxism can be resolved by a hard day’s work and/or the love of a sensible young woman crops up a few times in Christie).
I won’t give away the solution; suffice it to say that Miss Marple unpicks the threads in a tour de force of careful observation and close attention to human nature. This resolution not only arises naturally from the events and personalities of the novel, without any of the contrivance or clunky moving parts that even the Queen of Crime could not always avoid, but is integrated with one of the main dramatic motifs of the book; the transformation of post-war England.
A vanishing world
The broadly stable, prosperous and free England Christie had known as a child and a young woman had been convulsed, and holed below the waterline, by the First World War and its consequences, but the Second dealt the fatal blow. In the latter half of her career, she became increasingly preoccupied with the changes to English society after 1945. A Murder Is Announced is one of the first novels where this is apparent. Like many of the post-war novels - especially those written in the forties and fifties - it contains references, both direct and indirect, to the economic hardships facing the country: high rates of taxation, rationing, and what we might now call a cost of living crisis. This is understandable. Rationing of certain items, notably meat, sugar and coal, continued well into the 1950s (coal rationing did not end until 1958). Taxes had risen sharply during the war and went up again soon afterwards, with the tax burden rising from 25.3% of GDP in 1937-38 to 43.3% in 1949-50. The average annual rate of inflation in the decade after the war was 5%, with particularly serious bouts in 1947-48 and 1951-52; ten years of 5% inflation erodes the real purchasing power of currency by about 40%.
Inflation in particular must have been highly disconcerting and disruptive. No-one in post-war Britain, with the exception of refugees or immigrants from less happier lands, had ever experienced sustained serious inflation in peacetime (Christie was born in 1890). For most of the late nineteenth century, and during the “long Edwardian summer” of 1900-14, inflation had been negligible, with falling prices for much of the 1870s and 1880s, and for several years in the mid-1890s1. Between 1870 and 1914 - nearly half a century - the cumulative rate of inflation was only a little over 3%. The Great War was a severe blow to sound money, with the real value of sterling roughly halving between 1914 and 1920, but a long deflationary era followed, lasting throughout the twenties and into the mid-thirties, which meant that by the eve of the Second World War the real value of the pound had recovered significantly, to almost two-thirds of its 1914 value. There was no such return to the status quo ante after August 1945. Inflation became a fact of economic life, and has remained so ever since2.
Christie’s family came from a part of English society where it was common to have what is usually described as “independent means” or a “private income” (typically an annuity from invested capital that eliminated or reduced the need to undertake paid employment)3. People from this class often crop up in her stories. Miss Marple is one of them. It’s hard to know exactly how many Britons were living off “private incomes” in the first half of the twentieth century, but the regularity with which they appear in contemporary fiction - at various social levels, from the just-about-managing lower middle class making the most of a modest inheritance, to the proverbial idle rich - suggests that the concept was a familiar one to the reading public. However prevalent they were in 1910 or 1930, they must have been close to extinction by the 1960s and 1970s; in 1970, on the eve of decimalisation, the real value of the pound was only a third of what it had been just 25 years before - and was continuing to fall significantly year on year, meaning that living off savings or investments for any prolonged period was impossible for all except the very well-off4 .
Christie was not simply concerned about economic changes. By 1950 cultural and social transformation was underway, albeit slowly compared to later years. Her thoughts on what we might loosely call “The Sixties” - hippies, rock ‘n’ roll, sexual liberation and the abolition of hanging - are made very clear in later books like The Pale Horse (1961), Third Girl (1966) and Halloween Party (1969), but in A Murder Is Announced, Roy Jenkins and The Beatles are yet to wreak havoc; other concerns are to the fore. Most notable among these is the way in which English social life has altered. About halfway through the book (page 99 in my ancient Fontana paperback), Miss Marple laments to Inspector Craddock the decline of settled and tight-knit villages, including her own St Mary Mead:
“Fifteen years ago, one knew who everybody was. The Bantrys in the big house - and the Hartnells and the Price Ridleys and the Weatherbys…They were people whose fathers and mothers and grandfathers and grandmothers, or whose aunts and uncles, had lived there before them. If somebody new came to live there, they brought letters of introduction, or they’d been in the same regiment or served in the same ship as someone there already.
[…]
But it’s not like that any more. Every village and small country place is full of people who’ve just come and settled there without any ties to bring them. The big houses have been sold, and the cottages have been converted and changed. And people just come - and all you know about them is what they say of themselves […] But nobody knows any more who anyone is […] People take you at your own valuation. They don’t wait to call until they’ve had a letter from a friend saying that the So and So’s are delightful people and she’s known them all their lives.”
Another Miss Marple novel, The Mirror Crack’d From Side To Side, published about a decade later (1962), develops the same motif. By that time St Mary Mead has fully entered the modern world, with lots of young families buying appliances on credit and a new housing estate - the much-disliked Development. Teenagers have entered the picture, following their invention in the mid-1950s, while the beginning of sexual intercourse is only a year away. Gossington Hall, erstwhile home of Miss Marple’s gentry friends the Bantrys and the location of the eponymous corpse in The Body In The Library (1942), has passed through a succession of owners after Arthur Bantry’s death and is now in the hands of an American film star.
It’s hard not to hear in Miss Marple’s words the voice of Christie herself, who at the time of writing A Murder Is Announced was on the cusp of her seventh decade, and doubtless looking back fondly on a more stable and intelligible England. In the background, though not directly addressed, is the fading of Empire. As well as those who had left urban areas during the war and those returning from long war service or captivity overseas, people coming home from colonies or newly independent ex-possessions like India were an important component of the influx of relative strangers to British towns and villages in the late 1940s.
Craddock, for his part, concurs with Miss Marple, noting to himself that the suspects in the case are
“just faces and personalities […] backed up by ration books and identity cards […] anybody who took the trouble could have a suitable identity card - and partly because of that, the subtler links that had held together English social rural life had fallen apart […] In the country now nobody knew his neighbour, though possibly he still thought he did…”
This is hyperbolic as social history, but its interest lies in what it seems to reveal about how Christie perceived the decay of the old certainties. As well as these fairly direct authorial interventions, her inclusion of a young Swiss man of dubious background working in a hotel in provincial England might easily be considered an allusion to the social instability of the time.
Craddock is also concerned by the rise of crime and identity fraud following the war, although in the late 1940s crime rates were still remarkably low by modern standards. The mention of ID cards, a wartime measure controversially retained by the Attlee government and not finally abolished until 1952, is another reminder from Christie, consciously or not, of the strangeness of post-war Britain. Well within living memory was the pre-1914 world in which Christie had come to maturity and of which AJP Taylor had famously written in his English History 1914-45:
“Until August 1914 a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state, beyond the post office and the policeman.”
I have occasionally joked about the genteel poverty portrayed in Christie’s later novels, with middle-class folk making a great deal of their inability to afford servants, or finding that they have to get a job or take in paying guests rather than simply living off inheritances, savings or pensions. Mrs McGinty’s Dead (1952), finds Poirot staying in a rackety guesthouse owned by a couple recently home from India, who appear to be distressed gentry of the type who might have been able to live in a leisurely retirement two or three decades before. But in all fairness to such people, they were living through a revolution. Just a bit more than three decades on from the state of affairs described by Taylor, the state had taken control of large parts of the economy - transport, coal, civil aviation and electricity generation. Most of the healthcare system had been nationalised. The government rationed food and fuel, maintained wartime exchange controls (these were not finally abolished until the Thatcher era), and required people to carry ID cards. It’s hard, in 2025, to get a good imaginative grasp on what it must have been like to endure such an extraordinary transition. As noted earlier, the overall tax burden had risen by 70% in the decade before A Murder Is Announced was written, to peak at 43.3% of GDP. For older generations - those who had been adults before the first war - the change was even starker. In 1914 the tax burden had been only 13.5% of GDP.
Nobody Knows Any More Who Anyone Is
I said no spoilers, but I can say without fear of blowing the gaff that concerns about disruption to normal social relations, and in particular Miss Marple’s dissatisfaction with the anonymity and transience of then-contemporary village life, are vindicated by the denouement. Her and Craddock’s frustration turns out to be not only prescient in the world of the story, but also to give the reader a clue about the kind of lines they need to be thinking along. The inspector’s intuition that “in the country now nobody knew his neighbour” turns out to be literally true in more than one case. In classic Agatha Christie novels, characters often have hidden motivations; here, we have hidden characters, but not so hidden that the author is not “playing fair”.
Some writers on Christie have suggested that the Miss Marple books are insufficiently clued, with the resolution of the narrative overly reliant on Miss Marple’s intuitions, based on her lifetime of experience with human nature in a small community. This may be true of some titles, but certainly not A Murder Is Announced. There are plenty of breadcrumbs spread throughout the narrative such that when you do reach the final explanation, you will feel that you could have worked it out all by yourself, if only you’d been paying attention. After all, villages may not be what they used to be, but village mysteries can still be good thought-provoking fun.
Britain experienced a long agricultural depression from the 1870s to the 1890s, caused mainly by the growth of cheap American grain imports that followed the western expansion of the USA. While damaging to British farmers, and a key factor in the long-term decline of the landed aristocracy, this was obviously good for British consumers.
The 1939 pound had lost about 45% of its real value in the 69 years since 1870. Skip on another 69 years, to 2008, and the real value of the pound was about one thirty-fifth, or only 2.8%, of what it had been in 1939.
In her Autobiography, Christie writes fondly of her American father, Frederick Miller, by her account a warm-hearted, cheerful and generous man who enjoyed a comfortable existence as a “gentleman of leisure” on an income from family wealth in the USA.
There was much worse to come after 1970, with double-digit inflation for most of the decade following 1974. Inflation did not fall sustainably to what is now considered the acceptable 2-3% range until the 1990s. The pound held its value fairly well from around the mid-90s until the COVID-19 pandemic, with an annual average inflation rate of only 2% in the quarter century to 2019.
This is very good.
This gives a lot more punch to Harold Wilson agonizing about devaluing the pound. And it makes for a cracking mystery - times of change seem to create motives galore!