In the Library
The Murder at the Vicarage
Agatha Christie, 1930
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Accessible
- Reading time
- Reading time 5 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 32
- Length
- Length 70k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
In the public domain in the United States only: this edition is sold and read there and nowhere else.
There is no detective in England equal to a spinster lady of uncertain age with plenty of time on her hands.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
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About the book
Anyone who murdered Colonel Protheroe, the vicar remarks over Wednesday luncheon, would be doing the world a service. By the following evening the colonel is dead at the writing table in that same vicar's study, shot through the head, and the remark hangs over St Mary Mead like smoke. Here Miss Marple steps into her first novel, introduced slyly as the village's most dreaded gossip, a white-haired spinster who seems to see everything over her garden hedge. The joke is that she does. Her method is the parish itself: decades of watching it have taught her that every wickedness has a small, domestic twin living down the lane. The vicar narrates with a dry, rueful humour, and his warmth makes the cosiness feel lived in, not painted on. There is a clock that cannot be trusted, a note too conveniently timed, and more than one person eager to confess. Read it to watch a gentle old lady turn out to be the sharpest mind in the room, and to suspect, uneasily, that she would be right about your neighbours too.