Maggie Tells the Theme of Miss Marple’s Story

“The danger with such people is that when anything at all extraordinary really does happen to them, nobody believes they are speaking the truth.” (Christie 5).

Miss Marple Tells a Story is a story told in Miss Marple’s perspective of solving a case. Miss Marple learns of a recent murder in Crown Hotel where Mr. Rhode’s wife is murdered. She solves the case by asking Mr. Petherick, a shrewd friend of hers, and Mr. Rhode details about the suspects, considers all the possibilities and proves Mr. Rhode innocent by finding the culprit, Mrs. Carruthers. In the story Miss Marple Tells a Story, by Agatha Christie, the author believes that a person who makes their life sound like a fantasy frequently cultivates disbelief from other people. Mr. Rhode never taken any notice of Mrs. Rhode’s distress of the threatening letters: “’Frankly,’ he said, ‘I never believed it. I thought [Mrs. Rhode] had made most of it up.’” (4). Mr. Rhode knows that Mrs. Rhode likes to exaggerate a lot. From what Miss Marple gathered, Mrs. Rhode would describe her life as almost deaths and whimsical tales. So, it was possible that Mr. Rhode wasn’t aware that she could be telling the truth because it was a habit for Mr. Rhode to discount her statements. When Mr. Rhode attempted to tell the police about the threatening letters that Mrs. Rhode received, the police never believed Mr. Rhode. However, further along in the story, the claims of threatening letters were true.  Mrs. Rhode’s impractical and reckless way of living is why Mrs. Carruthers retaliated against her: “Mrs. Rhode, who was a most reckless and dangerous driver, had run over her little girl, and it had driven the poor woman off her head.” (7). Before Mrs. Rhode married Mr. Rhode, she used to drive without the regard of consequences and killed Mrs. Carruthers daughter. To seek revenge, Mrs. Carruthers hid her madness secretly and sent threatening letters which nobody believed that existed. At the end, Mrs. Carruthers killed Mrs. Rhode. Mrs. Carruthers used Mrs. Rhode’s way of romanticizing life as an advantage, because nobody will truly believe Mrs. Rhode. This is why a person who makes their life sound like a fantasy frequently cultivates disbelief from other people, and all the more dangerous when another character has a grudge against this person.