The place is hardly crime-ridden in the streets, and seems insulated from most of the problems of crime that plague real life today -- or even other crime books. One of the characters states that she doesn't "know anything about drugs-nasty, dangerous things I call them. I have got an old recipe of my grandmother's for tansy tea that is worth any amount of your drugs." (83) One could apply the explanation that one of the old ladies apply to a vacation town she thought was overly quaint to St. Mary Meade itself. "There is rather too much of the atmosphere of 'Ye Olde Cornish Tea House' about it. It has shops with bobbed-headed girls in smocks doing hand-illuminated mottoes on parchment." (47) in other words, the town is almost too quaint to seem real.
But all of the stories in the volume underline how even in the most ordinary places, terrible murders can happen, and in the ordinary details of
For instance, in the short story "The Idol House of Astarte," a man inexplicably dies after a fun costume party amongst the aristocratic set of St. Mary Meade. Miss Marple carefully unravels the plot because of her knowledge about jewelry. She sees that the thieving murderess "had the stones taken out of their setting and fastened here and there on her theatrical costume, where everyone would take them for merely colored rhinestones," and thus attempted to 'bait and switch' her booty during the party. (344) in "The Companion," two English ladies go on an ordinary seaside holiday together, but only one returns home alive. 'We only arrived yesterday and were so delighting in the sunshine and our little holiday. And now this-this terrible tragedy occurs,' exclaims of one of them. (111)
The mysteries are fun, and quaint, and picturesque -- but they also inspire a love of the heroine and prove to the reader that crime need not be bloody to be interesting. And also they show that simply because one may look innocent, or elderly, or both, does not mean one cannot have a capable mind and is worthy of respect
