Is Miss Marple A Timelord?

The Murder at the Vicarage (Miss Marple)

Is Miss Marple a Timelord? Is our friend, The Doctor, really the last of the Timelord race?  Could Miss Marple really be a Timelord (well, Timelady anyway)? It’s not as frankly stupid as it first sounds.

I’m not a crime fiction fan. Usually, you pick up a crime fiction book in a bookshop, read until the first dead body turns up before turning to the back pages to see who did it. There, spared yourself hours and hours of pointless plodding through another mindless thriller. TV adaptations often bore me too. I mean, for goodness sake, Robson Green in Wire In The Blood? There was once a show on Five called: “Extreme Fishing With Robson Green”. Now there’s a title which simultaneously makes you want and then not want to watch the show.

I studied detective fiction at university but, if you’d not read the same book as the lecturer had and based his life and teaching philosophy on, you were sunk and I sank without a trace. Ok, it might have helped had I not tried to read the book in the pub but that’s another story. But no, I’m not a crime fiction fan. With one or two exceptions:

Sherlock Holmes books and Agatha Christie.

Granted, the Miss Marple stories are based on the ludicrous premise that the law enforcement people are thick as bricks and only one seemingly dotty old lady can see what is really going on. To be honest, Miss Marple isn’t the best party guest either. Every time she shows up, someone gets killed. It’s like a perpetual game of Cluedo.  But I am an Agatha Christie fan. Indeed, when I was younger, TV adaptations of Christie stories scared me silly. I could watch Doctor Who for hours and not get scared but the stuff in the Christie books could potentially happen and that terrified me. Mind you, you are reading a blog by a guy who was scared by a Words and Pictures story about wolves wearing designer suits.

So, is Miss Marple a Timelady? We never see the regeneration but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen. Perhaps, after tea and biscuits and yet another silly, Murder-She-Wrote-Style scene where everybody gathers and the murderer shows ridiculous naivety by bothering to show up and be unmasked, Miss Marple takes a stroll outside…only to come face to face with the murderer she just unmasked. The Killer has escaped police custody and has a weapon pointed at Miss Marple. One shot. But, instead of falling to the floor, Miss Marple remains standing and a strange orange glow envelopes her being. Her body convulses in time with the energy and, all of a sudden, she begins to take on a new appearance and…oh, for goodness sake, it’s Angela Lansbury.

See, there’s even a Colin Baker equivalent in Marple’s incarnations. But this process is a bit dodgy.

ITV- do not get me started- butchered the Miss Marple stories. Mostly by employing the “dodgy” acting ability of Jamie Theakston and any other “celeb” they could get their hands on. Mind you, to be fair, the Joan Hickson stories did have that whole: “Last of The Summer Wine” thing going on.

The Geraldine McEwan incarnation did grow on me after a while. For one thing, she’s a good actor and for another, she managed to portray a character that looked like an old lady on the surface but masked a powerful intellect underneath.  But it wasn’t to last. We didn’t see the regeneration but the strange energy has returned and Miss Marple now looks like Julia McKenzie.

A Pocket Full of Rye (Miss Marple)

It’s always been about the quality of the writing. That’s why I make an exception for Christie. Because few writers- never mind crime writers- can hold a candle to her. Still, maybe ITV will go nuts and take their lead from Doctor Who and make the next Miss Marple a sex symbol? Will we have something ridiculous like Miss Marple regenerating into Sarah Michelle Gellar?  Food for thought.