Miss Marple is a very popular with Agatha Christie’s readers all over the Britain and America and it is a rather daunting task to try and play on television.
Gracie Fields (US TV guide, 1956)
Romance blossomed between Agatha Christie and Max Mallowan as they journeyed home from an archaeological dig at Ur, near Baghdad, travelling on the ‘Orient Express’ in 1930. When they arrived back in England, Max surprised Agatha by asking her to marry him. A whirlwind courtship resulted in the couple’s betrothal occurring only six months after their first meeting - but only once the forty-year-old bride had come to terms with the age difference with her twenty-six-year-old suitor, a situation perhaps resolved by the old music hall joke, ‘An archaeologist is the best husband a woman can have. The older she gets the more interested he is in her’.
The world’s most famous train journey would later inspire the novel dedicated to Max Mallowan, Murder on the Orient Express (1934), and the same mode of travel was naturally chosen to transport Agatha and Max on the first stage of their honeymoon to Venice. Following a tour of Greece, the newlyweds parted in Athens; Max rejoined the dig at Ur, while Agatha returned to London suffering from a violent bout of stomach poisoning. Her journey home confined to her bed on the ‘Orient Express’ became a nightmare, but did not compare with a tragedy on the train that later brought an end to the second marriage of Gracie Fields, the first actress to portray Miss Marple on television.
In 1938, the Mallowans took the decision to sell Ashfield and move to the tranquillity of Greenway on the River Dart. Agatha was dismayed by the urbanisation of her hometown, which had experienced a population explosion as cheap travel made holidays available to the working classes. People fell in love with the resort and permanently left the industrial towns of the North to make their home in Torquay. One of the firms that pioneered coach travel from Lancashire to Devon was Yelloway, which grew from a Rochdale haulage firm launched by brothers Robert and Ernest Holt. At weekends in the early 1900s, the company would convert their lorries into charabancs and run trips to places of interest, including the ever-popular resort of Blackpool, before an unexpected opportunity arose to transport holidaymakers to Torbay. In 1911, a holiday was organised by a local printing firm for their annual staff holiday during regatta week in Torquay. Their journey was normally made by train, but a rail workers’ strike necessitated the hire of a charabanc instead. Among the twenty-six people and one dog who made the inaugural 300-mile road journey from Rochdale to Torquay was singing sensation Gracie Fields (1898-1979), whose father Fred Stansfield maintained the vehicles for Holt Bros. The thirteen-year-old entertainer had already taken the first step on the ladder to fame by joining a girl’s troupe until the vulnerable young girl was sexually assaulted and hospitalised for six weeks, suffering from a nervous breakdown that threatened her future in show business. Fortunately, the seaside holiday proved just the tonic and quickly restored her brash confidence as she kept up the passengers’ spirits by leading the singing during the tortuous two-day journey. When the weary holidaymakers finally reached their destination, Gracie entered a talent competition on Paignton seafront and scooped the first prize of a purse, 10s and a pair of roller skates.
After continuing to tour with juvenile troupes, Gracie was made into a major national star by comedian Archie Pitts, who became her first husband. Her diverse repertoire included opera, ballads, hymns and comic songs. During the 1930s, she established herself as a leading film star in roles that recreated her own ‘rags to riches’ rise from mill girl to celebrity. Her screen debut in Sally in our Alley (1931) also provided her with the show-stopping song forever associated with her, ‘Sally’. Her huge success led to offers from Hollywood and, following her divorce from Archie Pitt, she married her film director Monty Banks in 1940. During wartime, the couple came in for undeserved criticism for residing in America, a decision forced on them as Banks was born in Italy and faced detention as an ‘enemy alien’ in Britain. Gracie re-established herself in the nation’s affections after the war and as one of England’s best-known actresses across the Atlantic, she was chosen to introduce Miss Marple to the small screen. In a series of plays shown on The Goodyear Television Playhouse, the story chosen for adaptation was Agatha Christie’s fiftieth novel, A Murder is Announced (1950), which was broadcast live from New York on 30 December 1956. Billed as: ‘An edge-of-theseat murder mystery featuring the Queen of Crime’s famous lady sleuth’, the production was not recorded for future showings and failed to impress the television critic of the New York Times: ‘The mystery of the Goodyear Playhouse last night was not whodunnit – but rather why? Why, for example, did… Gracie Fields ever get involved in such an inferior melodrama? It was murder from beginning to end’.
Gracie Fields was fully aware of the historic significance of her one-off performance and in a television guide revealed her thoughts on the characterisation she had adopted to play the role of Miss Marple: ‘I have always imagined her as a rather quiet lady with a quick turn of mind and a nose for murder’.
The music hall, stage, radio, television, film and recording star also made ten Royal Command performances and was made a Dame of the British Empire shortly before her death. Until the end of her life she remained a fervent fan of Agatha Christie and at her home in Capri, her library contained almost the whole the works of her favourite author. In 1950, a strange twist of fate tragically linked Gracie to a Christie story; while travelling to their island home, Monty Banks suffered a fatal heart attack and died in the arms of his wife travelling across Europe on board the… ‘Orient Express’.
In 1977, a severely ill nineteen-month-old child was flown on a mercy mission from Qatar to London for life-saving treatment. Her condition baffled doctors at Hammersmith Hospital when she was admitted semi-conscious and unresponsive to speech or commands. The next day at the routine ward rounds, Nurse Maitland, who had been monitoring the patient, put down the book that she was reading and surprised doctors with what proved to be an accurate diagnosis. She had been reading Agatha Christie’s The Pale Horse (1961) in which thallium poisoning was described with symptoms that matched the child’s. A laboratory test was arranged and ten times the typical amount of thallium was detected. The likely source was thought to be a domestic poison used to kill household pests which had been ingested by the child over a long period of time at the family home. Although the prognosis once neurological symptoms have set in is usually hopeless, the child responded well to treatment and made a good recovery.