There is a specific geography with a hotel—and you sometimes have these hidden spaces as well that you might only know about if you’re a seasoned or a more favored guest. In this one, I had great fun with putting in things like a secret bar, which you have at the Kulm Hotel.
You also have anonymity in a hotel. People can come and check-in and become someone that perhaps they’re not at home. I think Christie does that so well in At Bertram’s Hotel, this idea that it’s a weirdly democratizing space in some ways and also quite an anonymous space where people might not be who they seem.
What makes Miss Marple such a great traveler?
That ability to observe; she is such a great reader of character, of people, and that’s something that she can apply wherever she is. It’s funny, she’s always referring things back to her experience in St. Mary’s Mead because it’s this wonderful microcosm of everything that humanity can be. But you see that even in A Caribbean Mystery, which is the furthest she travels in the original books.
There is always something that can be applied back to her lived experience. She really takes people as they are, wherever they’re from, wherever she finds herself, and she sees the truth of them. I think that actually is something that differentiates her from Poirot. We often see him having his head turned by some pretty young thing who he can’t possibly imagine doing anything unpleasant, and actually they turn out to be pure evil or malice, and Marple, she would know from the outset.
She’s very enigmatic in a way. Do we ever really see the true Marple? At times we see flashes of real rage, in A Pocket Full of Rye, she’s motivated by anger to solve that murder. In Nemesis, there’s this scene where she becomes the figure of nemesis, in this very powerful, shape-shifting way. She can be what another character needs her to be at any given time, a little bit like the Gray Man from spy fiction, but she is also very much herself and very unique at the same time.
If you had the opportunity to do so, where would you want to send Ms. Marple next?
I don’t know if I’m going to show my hand too much here, at the moment it’s very much a one-time thing, but I’ll give a little Christie Easter egg, so I won’t actually say the place, but I’ll let people go and do their own research. Miss Marple hasn’t always lived in St. Mary’s Mead. We find out that in her youth she lived in a different country for a time, so I think I would take her back there.
