Status
Call number
Library's review
En meget lidt vellidt mand, Oberst Lucius Protheroe, bliver fundet skudt bagfra gennem hovedet i præstens studereværelse i den lille by, St. Mary Mead.
Hans kone Anne Protheroe, er forelsket i kunstmaleren Lawrence Redding og de tilstår gensidigt mordet, tilsyneladende fordi de
Historien fortælles af præsten Leonard Clement - kaldet Len - der er gift med en meget yngre kone Griselda.
Miss Marple finder ud af at det i virkeligheden var Anne Protheroe og Lawrence Redding, der myrdede obersten og gensidigt hjalp med et alibi.
Griselda opdager samtidig med opklaringen af mordet at hun er gravid, men selv det har Miss Marple også fundet ud af.
Udmærket krimi.
Genres
Publication
Description
Fiction. Mystery. Historical Fiction. HTML: The Murder at the Vicarage is Agatha Christie's first mystery to feature the beloved investigator Miss Marple�??as a dead body in a clergyman's study proves to the indomitable sleuth that no place, holy or otherwise, is a sanctuary from homicide. Miss Marple encounters a compelling murder mystery in the sleepy little village of St. Mary Mead, where under the seemingly peaceful exterior of an English country village lurks intrigue, guilt, deception and death. Colonel Protheroe, local magistrate and overbearing land-owner is the most detested man in the village. Everyone�??even in the vicar�??wishes he were dead. And very soon he is�??shot in the head in the vicar's own study. Faced with a surfeit of suspects, only the inscrutable Miss Marple can unravel the tangled web of clues that will lead to the unmasking of the… (more)
User reviews
I was particularly engaged by the vicar and his wife, Griselda. On the surface he appears to be the perfect village parson, proper and earnest, but his inner thoughts revealed a sense of humor and a knowledge of human foibles. And while she totally lacked the decorum that one would expect the vicar’s wife to have, Griselda was charming, forthright and fresh. Agatha Christie always seems to people her books with characters that are on the verge of becoming stereotypes yet they still ring true and are fun to read about. In the small village of Saint Mary Mead, we have an assortment of village busybodies and residents’ daily routines are well known and any variations, however slight, are noted and commented on.
In typical Christie fashion, the reader is offered many suspects, lots of clues with a few red herrings scattered about and a final reveal with a slight twist just to keep things interesting.
I think this is one of Christie's better books, although not the best and perhaps not one of her better murder plots. It's a longer book than some, and as a result there is more to it. There are some good subplots, and (perhaps because this was the first full-length Miss Marple novel) there is a lot of background and context which is just taken for granted in some of the later books. The first-person narrative is interesting, and both the narrator and the rest of the village are well-drawn and well-developed characters.
A good mystery - and one of the few where the (1986) film matches the book for quality. (I have obviously watched the film too many times, though, because I could hear Joan Hickson uttering every one of Miss Marple's lines in my head - and hear Paul Eddington doing the same for the vicar.)
*Miss Marple is a white-haired old lady with a gentle, appealing manner.
*Miss Marple always sees everything. Gardening is as good as a smoke screen, and the habit of observing birds through powerful glasses can always be turned to account.
*In St. Mary Mead everyone knows your most intimate affairs. *There is no detective in England equal to a spinster lady of uncertain age with plenty of time on her hands.
*I smiled. For all her fragile appearance, Miss Marple is capable of holding her own with any policeman or Chief constable in existence.
The story of Murder at the Vicarage is told in the first person by the vicar, Len Clement. The village of St. Mary Mead is a quiet, pleasant place. Hardly anything happens there. But, there is one man whom everyone dislikes - Colonel Protheroe.
One day he ends up dead, shot in the head, in the Vicar's study. The police are called to investigate all the clues but their job is much easier when someone confesses. Of course, the Vicar and his wife and their neighbor, Miss Marple don't believe the confession. They begin to gather their own information.
Most confusing of all the clues is a note by the body and an over turned clock, as well as the comings and goings of so many people to the Vicarage. Miss Marple believes there are seven people who could have killed Colonel Protheroe. The mystery is - which one of those seven did it, or could it be an eighth person?
This is definitely one of my favorites so far, and not just because I love Miss Marple. It's very light-hearted and often humorous. The characters of the Vicar and his wife are also appealing. Ms. Christie added drawings to the book to help in the understanding of where all the buildings lie, the layout of the Vicar's house and study. Very helpful.
When you get right down to it, there isn't much to the story. It is a fairly typical Christie mystery, making you think you know the conclusion until she pulls the rug right out from underneath you when she reveals the mastermind behind the murder. The murder in question is that of Colonel Protheroe, a not-much-loved member of the village, who is found murdered in the vicars writing room. There are plenty of people with motives, and plenty bits of misdirection, but it is up to Miss Marple to put the pieces together and discover the identity of the true culprit before it's too late.
A fun little read with an endearing character in Miss Marple, the whole story is wrapped up with a nice and tidy ending. Not a bad choice if you're looking for an easy mystery read.
This is the first Miss Marple novel although she had been introduced to readers in short story in 1927. Basically she is an elderly spinster living in St. Mary Mead, with apparently little experience of life outside the village. She has already figured in solving small village mysteries in the past, but the Vicar and his wife both regard her as a busy body, although more astute than most.
Colonel Protheroe, an extremely unpleasant and unpopular character, is found murdered in the same vicar's study, and two different people confess to the crime. The investigation is handed locally to Inspector Slack, who has a great belief in fingerprints, and expects to be able to solve the murder quickly and easily. There are a number of red herrings. At firts Miss Marple who lives next door to the Vicarage doesn't seem to take much part in the novel, but then she seems to hover in the background.
The novel really sets a pattern for what we can expect in future novels and there are a range of characters who will crop up again in the future.
The vicar and his wife, Leonard and Griselda Clement respectively, who made their first appearance in this novel, continue to show up in Miss Marple stories: notably, in The Body in the Library (1942) and 4.50 from Paddington (1957)
The Chief Constable, Colonel Melchett becomes involved, as does Sir Henry Clithering, a friend of Miss Marple's and a former head of Scotland Yard. He will feature in a number of Miss Marple stories. We are also introduced to Raymond West, Miss Marple's nephew, who is an author and will also feature in a number of future plots.
Agatha Christie uses the narrator device which she relied on so much in the Poirot novels. we see the story through the eyes of the vicar Leonard Clement. However it is really us seeing things as the vicar does, hearing conversations he is part of, and so on, rather than the impression of a written journal.
The other thing I have noticed in this novel is that Christie uses numbered chapters, without giving each chapter a number and a title as she did in the Poirot novels.
There are still references to the impact of the first world war on English society.
There are a number of side-plots which flesh out the setting: among them the parentage of Lettice Protheroe, and a love interest in the marriage of Leonard and Griselda Clement, the vicar and his wife.
I’m not spoiling anything
For starters, there’s Protheroe’s unhappy wife who’s lately been caught in an amorous embrace with the handsome artist Lawrence Redding.
There’s Redding himself, who wants nothing more than to whisk Mrs. Protheroe away from her red-faced, vein-popping husband. Then, too, there’s the fact that Redding owns a 25-caliber Mauser pistol.
There’s the colonel’s daughter, Lettice who, despite her produce-sounding name, is no wilting leaf. She’s bright, ambitious and anxious to get her hands on her inheritance. Plus, she's been having her portrait painted by Redding, much to the displeasure of her father. Miss Protheroe, it seems, does her afternoon sittings clad only in a bathing suit…with nary a swimming pool in sight.
And then there’s the vicar himself, Leonard Clements, who narrates the story and guides readers through the mystery. Dame Christie stirs up some delicious delights when, in only the second paragraph of the novel, she has the vicar announce to the reader: I had just finished carving some boiled beef….and on resuming my seat I remarked, in a spirit most unbecoming to my cloth, that anyone who murdered Colonel Protheroe would be doing the world at large a service.
Later, of course, he regrets those words. But by then, the plot is so tangled, so full of suspects that he’s just one of many in the usual Christie line-up. As with many of her intricately committed (and just-as-intricately untangled) crimes, the reader is politely asked to keep pace with all the clues, thank you very much. No dozing, reader; no letting your attention wander over to the Internet, please; stay with the rest of the group and keep your eyes peeled.
Well, I kept my eyes peeled like an orange and I was still blindsided by the denouement. I’ve yet to solve a Christie mystery from my armchair. I doubt I ever will. That’s not the point of reading her delightful novels. I turn the pages because I can get swept away into the oh-so-veddy-proper world of the quaint English hamlet, populated with a full spectrum of colorful characters. Other writers like P.D. James have done similarly well in the genre, but it’s always Christie I go back to time and again for the quintessential British mystery. No one kills characters better than the twinkle-eyed Agatha.
And no one solves mysteries better than her long-running (and long-knitting) sleuth Miss Jane Marple, the white-haired, gossipy spinster who makes her first appearance on the page here in Murder at the Vicarage. A keen observer of human nature who wields a pretty wicked knitting needle (by the way, who wears all those sweaters she keeps churning out?), Miss Marple sees evil everywhere she looks with her china-blue eyes.
In this, her debut, Miss Marple doesn’t take center stage until near the end of the book (the vicar, by virtue of his first-person point of view, dominates the narrative). In fact, if you were to judge by the first reference to the endearing old biddy, you might think Christie had no intention of writing sixteen other mysteries featuring Miss Marple. Here’s how she’s first described by the vicar’s wife: ‿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.‿
In her autobiography, Christie confesses: I cannot remember…what suggested to me that I should select a new character—Miss Marple—to act as the sleuth of the story Murder at the Vicarage. Certainly at the time I had no intention of continuing her for the rest of my life.
I, for one, am glad she did. Just think, if there’d been no Miss Marple, the world would probably have a lot more murderers on its hands. It would almost certainly have a lot less sweaters.
Murder at the Vicarage
Agatha Christie
The very first Miss Marple mystery, though told from the point of view of the local St. Mary Mead vicar, not Miss Marple herself.
A local resident, not a popular fellow, is found murdered in the vicar’s study, on an evening when the vicar was
Miss Marple, who lives next door to the vicarage, is a nosy busybody who irritates and illuminates at the same time. She annoys everyone with her apologetic observations that knock out the Inspector’s theory of the murder, but the vicar can’t help but be fascinated by her shrewd intelligence. She catches the tiny details no one else does, such as the time printed at the top of the note, and the incongruity of what’s actually written. It never seems strange or sinister until Miss Marple points it out.
This is the first Miss Marple mystery, written in 1930 and just as intriguing today as it was then, I'm sure. It's told from the perspective of the vicar, which surprised me a bit, and Christie's wit is sharp as a tack throughout. It's no wonder she has so many fans. I found this book to be very good, but not spectacular.
The first book in the Miss Marple series, so there is some buildup of material at the beginning that seems to slow the pace of the
There's a fair bit of social commentary in this story, which I felt added some depth to the telling. Miss Marple establishes herself
Excitement dies down when somebody confesses to having committed the crime. But that is not the end, for almost inmediately somebody quite different also confesses. And there is a third confession through the telephone. But who really killed Colonel Protheroe?
ISBN
Church warden Lucius Protheroe must have been the most unpopular man in St. Mary Mead. Even the Vicar had been heard to wish him dead. And now he was. Dead that is. And what's more shot while he was sitting at a writing table in the vicar's study.
It was more than a decade since there had been a murder in the village, before the vicar's time. Until this point Miss Jane Marple who lives right next door to the vicarage had only exercised her deductive skills on petty incidents. She has always believed the method she has developed could be used in a 'real' case and here is her chance. Between them Miss Marple and the vicar make a formidable sleuthing team.
This is Agatha Christie's first book with Miss Marple. Up until now she has seemed to be in search of a satisfactory protagonist, although Hercule Poirot has made 5 appearances. Indeed Miss Marple won't get another outing for another 12 years. In THE MURDER AT THE VICARAGE the Vicar plays a similar role to Hastings with Poirot, and Watson with Holmes. However I did feel he was more of equal standing with Miss Marple.
THE MURDER AT THE VICARAGE is written through the vicar's eyes, and at first we see Jane Marple as a village busybody, not particularly popular, and extremely observant. The vicar comes to appreciate that she misses very little. I wasn't convinced that Agatha Christie had quite settled on Miss Marple as her next sleuth. In fact, I wondered if she was thinking of a partnership, and indeed, the vicar and his wife appear in the next Miss Marple mystery THE BODY IN THE LIBRARY (1942).
I thought this, #10, the best in the Agatha Christie novels so far, but apparently it did not get a particularly good reception. A number of reviewers in 1930 said that it was far from her best.
Agatha Christie had written several short stories in which Miss Marple appeared but The Murder at the Vicarage, was her first novel with Miss Marple. The vicar is the narrator and he and his wife, Griselda, are much more clearly developed than Miss Marple is. In fact, Miss Marple is not the central character at all and the person we know from having seen her on TV and read other books about her is not really the person that is in this book. It seems clear that Ms. Christie did not have a clear picture of who Miss Marple was at this point and as a result did not write the second Miss Marlpe for another 12 years. But while Miss Marple was not the centeral character in the book, she is the star of the book, the one who takes her "hobby of observing people" and uses it in an "important" crime and solves the mystery.
The murder itself in this book is of the highly graphed and planned out type but the solution is actually more psychologically grounded than have been most of Poirot’s. There are a surprising number of three dimensional characters in the book and there is at least as much enjoyment in reading it as a Austen-like exploration of love among the no longer young gentry as for the solution to the crimes.
This book will be an especially enjoyable read for anyone who finds the heavily stereotypical characters of Poirot a little hard to take and wants a good natured look at life among the lesser gentry in English villages between the wars
Well, she may not be an Austen
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.
Underestimated as an old bitty, a inconsequential spinster who "knows nothing of life," Miss Marple hides under her unassuming manner sharp observations and an even sharper mind. Moreover, by the end of the novel I was quite fond of the vicar and his wife. If you haven't read Agatha Christie, you're missing something special, although I wouldn't number this one as one of her best. Of the novels by her I've read, the ones that are my favorites include Death Comes at the End (set in Ancient Egypt), And Then There Were None, Murder on the Orient Express and The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.
Subjects
Awards
Language
Original language
Original publication date
Physical description
ISBN
Local notes
Omslaget viser et lidt besynderligt ur, der viser 23 minutter over 6 og ser ud til at være itu Det henviser til uret fundet nær den dræbte, men præsten har det med at stille urene frem.
Indskannet omslag - N650U - 150 dpi
Oversat fra engelsk "Murder at the Vicarage" af Poul Ib Liebe
Other editions
Similar in this library
Pages
DDC/MDS
823.912 |