62 pages • 2 hours read
Agatha ChristieA Murder Is Announced
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1950A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Lasting Effects of World War II
A Murder Is Announced illustrates how the effects of World War II lasted long after the conflict was over. Although Mrs. Swettenham claims “we’ve got over all that” (3), Christie presents an England still negotiating postwar challenges, including economic austerity and changes to the fabric of society.
Christie’s fiction usually focuses on the English upper to middle classes, and A Murder Is Announced is no exception. However, in this novel, the author features formerly well-off characters reduced to making do. The continued rationing system, due to food and fuel shortages, is shown to be a social leveler. Although illicit bartering permits Chipping Cleghorn’s residents to exchange goods, they go without luxuries. For example, the creation of Delicious death cake involves Miss Blacklock sacrificing ingredients she was saving for Christmas. Meanwhile, the villagers’ repeated exclamations over Miss Blacklock’s central heating reflect their surprise that she is prepared to fire it up with such a limited fuel supply.
A further issue for the characters is hiring and keeping servants. After World War II, there was a shortage of servants as many women had left domestic service for other occupations. Mrs. Swettenham, accustomed to having many servants in India, worries about the consequences of losing her only “help.” Similarly, Miss Blacklock retains Mitzi while admitting “she exasperates and infuriates us all” (63). Meanwhile, several other households share the same cleaner, Mrs. Butt.
Socially, Phillipa is the most extreme case of genteel poverty, working as a gardener since emerging from the war as a single parent. Her reduced circumstances are highlighted when Mrs. Easterbrook condescendingly greets her “with a little extra cordiality to show that she quite understood that Phillipa was not really an agricultural labourer” (30).
Christie emphasizes the way lives have been fragmented by the war through the prevalence of women who either have lost their husbands or have never married. With a notable shortage of men in Chipping Cleghorn, she depicts non-traditional households, such as Boulders and Little Paddocks, where women have set up home together. Displaced characters such as Mitzi and Emma (or “Julia”) also feature in the narrative. While Mitzi’s family is killed in the war, Emma loses touch with her father and is adrift after her involvement with the French Resistance. There are also the Swettenhams and Colonel Easterbrook, who were forced back to England after the Partition of India.
Overall, the novel presents a portrait of English life that appears reassuringly picturesque and tranquil from a distance, while the characters experience postwar anxiety due to changes in British society. Within the microcosm of Chipping Cleghorn, certainties about the class system and the traditional family unit are eroding.
Small-Town Communities, Xenophobia, and Identity
Golden Age detective novels are often set within an English village, the close-knit rural communities represented as timeless places sheltered from the harsh realities of the world. Unlike the city, the English village is perceived as a place of social (if class-driven) stability: The community’s hierarchy is well-defined, from the Lord of the manor and the vicar at the “top,” to laborers and servants at the “bottom.” In a typical Golden Age mystery, the ordered world of the English village is briefly disrupted by murder before harmony is restored—but in A Murder Is Announced, Christie portrays the decline of the traditional village structure and its unsettling impact on the characters’ perception of identity.
Initially, Chipping Cleghorn is presented much like any romanticized pastoral idyll. Not only is it picturesque, but the inhabitants leave their doors unlocked so neighbors can come and go with their bartered produce. The female characters’ eager scanning of the personal ads in the local Gazette indicates that their neighbors’ lives seem more relevant than the national news. In fact, Miss Blacklock’s plan to kill Scherz hinges on the certainty that her curious neighbors will visit and serve as witnesses. Nevertheless, as the narrative progresses, it becomes clear that the outside world has infiltrated this community, creating a sense of threat and uncertainty.
One factor in the changing nature of rural life is increased globalization, primarily caused by the war. Scherz seems to justify the postwar fear of citizens from other nations when he visits Chipping Cleghorn with the apparent purpose of either theft or murder. Mrs. Harmon’s description of Scherz—a “rather weaselly-looking foreigner” (90)—sums up the inhabitants’ suspicion and hostility toward “the Other.” The villagers extend their xenophobia to Mitzi, surmising that she must be in league with Scherz as a fellow “foreigner.”
The villagers’ xenophobia reflects a wider anxiety about the fluidity of identity in a changing world. Inspector Craddock notes how the war has made it easier for people to assume “borrowed identities.” Consequently, the newcomers to rural communities may not be who they claim to be. Craddock suggests this phenomenon is why “the subtler links that had held together English social rural life had fallen apart” (133).
As the novel progresses, it becomes clear that many characters are relatively new residents of Chipping Cleghorn. Instead of being a long-established community, the village consists of disparate people thrown together. The Swettenhams and Colonel Easterbrook have recently arrived from India, while Julia, Patrick, and Phillipa are temporary residents from other parts of England. Meanwhile, Miss Blacklock (the closest thing to the Lady of the Manor) has chosen to live in Chipping Cleghorn precisely because no one will know her. Furthermore, many of these inhabitants are imposters with a hidden agenda. By creating a village riddled with fake identities, Christie highlights the destabilization of the small community.
Youth and Age: The Generational Divide
A Murder Is Announced features a distinct group of characters in their early twenties (“Julia,” Patrick, Edmund, and Phillipa) and a separate circle in their sixties (Miss Marple, Miss Blacklock, Miss Hinchcliffe, and Miss Murgatroyd). Only a handful of characters span the generational gap, and Christie suggests that these two generations are pitted against each other. While two world wars have shaped the older characters, a modern generation is emerging with different concerns and values.
Emma, posing as Julia, highlights her youthful perspective when she questions Miss Blacklock about life before fuel rationing. Her conjecture that there must have been “heaps of coke and coal for everybody?” is made “with the interest of one hearing about an unknown country” (26). Emma cannot relate to this image of the past as she has not lived it. Inspector Craddock reinforces this point when he asks Miss Marple to read Letitia Blacklock’s letters, as she understands “how these people’s minds worked” (219). His words imply that he cannot bridge the gap between his perspective and that of the older characters.
The younger generation in the novel, referred to as “the bright young things” (6), are largely disinterested in the older characters, considering them irrelevant. Patrick and “Julia” are glib, amoral characters who appear emotionally unaffected by the murders. Entirely self-centered, they lack a sense of accountability, hence Dora’s assumption that their carelessness caused the “cigarette burn” on the drawing-room table. Edmund is cavalier in his own way, while Phillipa appears aloof. These younger characters’ typically unsympathetic traits are intensified by the looming threat that two of them may be Pip and Emma.
Older female characters, like Dora and Miss Murgatroyd, are portrayed as pliable, agreeable, and easily confused: traits associated with a patriarchal notion of women as “the weaker sex.” However, the younger women in the novel are significantly more self-assured. Phillipa and Julia are cool, collected, and assertive. Meanwhile, Mrs. Easterbrook feigns this “feminine” weakness to manipulate her older husband, whose attitude is implicitly patriarchal. Through these characters, Christie signals the emergence of liberated, independent women following the war.
Miss Marple and Miss Blacklock both feel they are becoming superfluous in an ever-changing world. Sympathizing with Miss Blacklock’s loneliness, Miss Marple observes, “[T]here’s no one who knew me as a young girl—no one who belongs to the old days” (206). Nevertheless, there are advantages to the invisibility of old age, which both characters exploit to the full. Miss Marple uses the other characters’ tendency to overlook her to further her investigations, while Miss Blacklock exploits the maxim that “[o]ne elderly woman is very like another” to impersonate her sister (171).
Through her depiction of youth, age, and the divide between them, Christie reflects the changing nature of society. However, she also issues a warning not to underestimate the older generation. While the novel features unscrupulous young people waiting for their elders to die, it is the older women who pose the real threat: Miss Marple as an investigator and Miss Blacklock as a murderous imposter.
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