Picked shrimps
This afternoon I presented a paper at the quarterly meeting of the “Three Garridebs,” Westchester’s scion society of the Baker Street Irregulars. Here it is recorded for posterity, almost entirely as delivered (minus a brief ad-lib apology for its being more about Miss Marple than about Sherlock Holmes!).
At the beginning of Watson’s 1904 story The Missing Three-Quarter, Sherlock Holmes remarks that “even the most insignificant problem would be welcome in these stagnant days.” However, in A Case of Identity, published 1891, Holmes had indicated that in fact “it is usually in un-important matters that there is a field for the observation and quick analysis of cause and effect which give charm to an investigation. The larger crimes are apt to be the simpler”; by which he means the little mysteries are apt to be the more baffling.
About forty years later, Agatha Christie published The Thirteen Problems, a collection of stories about Miss Jane Marple, resident mystery-solver of St. Mary Mead. These stories are grouped in two sixes: six stories told at a dinner-party one year, and six at a party the next year. In the book’s first story, titled The Tuesday Night Club, in the presence of guests including Sir Henry Clithering (erstwhile Commissioner of Scotland Yard), Miss Marple’s nephew Raymond West asks these guests for contributions on the subject of “unsolved mysteries: things that have happened and that no one has ever explained.”
“I know just the sort of thing you mean, dear,” said Miss Marple. “For instance Mrs. Carruthers had a very strange experience yesterday morning. She bought two gills of picked shrimps at Elliot’s. She called at two other shops and when she got home she found she had not got the shrimps with her. She went back to the two shops she had visited, but these shrimps had completely disappeared. Now that seems to me very remarkable.”
“A very fishy story,” said Sir Henry, gravely.
“There are, of course, all kinds of possible explanations,” said Miss Marple. “For instance—”
but Raymond cuts her off, and the story of Mrs. Carruthers is not again referred to—that year. What Mrs. Carruthers had lost, by the way, was two gills, or half a pint; of “picked shrimps,” or shrimp-meat without the shells in, such as one might use in hors d’oeuvres or sauces.
Now, the book’s tenth story, A Christmas Tragedy, takes place about a year later. Sir Henry visits again, and, like Watson in A Case of Identity, asks Miss Marple whether she has currently any “pet mystery” to report.
Miss Marple shook her head. “Nothing that would interest you, Sir Henry. We have our little mysteries, of course—there was that gill of picked shrimps that disappeared so incomprehensibly; but that wouldn’t interest you because it all turned out to be so trivial, though throwing a considerable light on human nature.”
Sir Henry encourages her to tell the story; but “You’re so fond of your joke,” says Miss Marple. “The shrimps are only nonsense.”
So it is clear that sometime in the intervening year Miss Marple has solved the mystery of the missing shrimps. The Murder at the Vicarage, published 1930, at first seems to confirm this. When Colonel Protheroe is murdered, the vicar’s wife, Griselda, says:
“I wish you’d solve the case, Miss Marple, like you did the way Miss Wetherby’s gill of picked shrimps disappeared. And all because it reminded you of something quite different about a sack of coals.”
“You’re laughing, my dear,” said Miss Marple. “But, after all, that is a very sound way of arriving at the truth.”
The vicar adds: “You mean that if a thing reminds you of something else—well, it’s probably the same kind of thing.”
Later, Miss Marple herself mentions having solved the mystery:
“Take a little problem—for instance the gill of picked shrimps that amused dear Griselda so much—a quite unimportant mystery, but absolutely incomprehensible unless one solves it right.”
This raises the question: What was Miss Marple’s solution to the incomprehensible affair of the shrimps?
Now, the alert listener will have noticed a subtle evolution: In The Tuesday Night Club, the mystery was that Mrs. Carruthers had lost two gills of shrimps. In A Christmas Tragedy, it was the incomprehensible disappearance of one gill. And in Murder at the Vicarage, it’s Miss Wetherby who has lost it. Not only does Christie withhold the answer to this mundane mystery, it’s unclear what the question is!
This puzzle caught my eye on the question-and-answer website StackExchange, and I decided to dig into it. In my researches I did turn up one novel solution to a shrimp mystery. In Notes and Queries, November 21, 1891, a correspondent writes:
Ideas as to what is “good for food” come simply from use and habit. I remember, about thirty years ago, when the “harvest of the sea” did not often come far inland, my father, who was staying at Weymouth, sent some shrimps to the parish clerk at home in Warwickshire. But afterwards, on being asked how they were enjoyed, the old clerk bashfully owned that “they looked so like crickets that none of the family could bring themselves to eat them, so they were buried in the garden.”
Still, I doubt that’s the correct solution to our case.
During the Second World War, Agatha Christie wrote a Miss Marple novel and sealed it, unpublished, in a bank vault, as a kind of pension plan for her daughter. That novel was published posthumously in 1976 under the title Sleeping Murder. In chapter three, Raymond West is speaking of his Aunt Jane. “She adores problems,” he says;
“any kind of problems. What happened to the vicar’s surplice. Why the grocer’s wife took her umbrella to the church social on a fine evening. Why a gill of picked shrimps was found where it was. All grist to my Aunt Jane’s mill.”
Why a gill of shrimps was found where it was!
I find it marvelous that Christie seems to have spent a half-century, some of it posthumously, doling out these clues in precisely the proper order. The meta-mystery at first is: how does Mrs. Carruthers’ two-gill loss relate to a one-gill loss? Then we learn the one-gill loss was suffered by someone else entirely. Finally, learning that one gill was also found in an unexpected place alters the whole case, and makes it comprehensible!
Now here’s my solution. Here’s what I think happened:
Mrs. Carruthers goes to Elliot’s in the morning and buys two gills of shrimps. She then visits shops A and B. At one of these she absent-mindedly leaves her shrimps behind on a shelf. She discovers her loss and retraces her steps to shops A and B, but neither shopkeeper has seen her shrimps. Perhaps they were thrown out by the morning assistant.
That afternoon, Miss Wetherby also goes to Elliot’s, and buys a single gill of picked shrimps. Miss Wetherby also absent-mindedly leaves them somewhere—let’s say in shop C.
Mrs. Carruthers tells Miss Marple about the disappearance of her two gills of shrimps. The next evening, Miss Marple tells Sir Henry and the others. This is critical to the development of the mystery, because it allows word to get around; so that the next day, when Mrs. Carruthers enters shop C, Shopkeeper C tells her, “I found those shrimps that you lost the other day!” Mrs. Carruthers is mystified as to how this could be, as she had not visited shop C until after she’d lost her shrimps.
Later, of course, Miss Marple hears not only about this find but also about Miss Wetherby’s loss, and puts two and two together.
During The Tuesday Night Club, while events are still unfolding, the mystery is what became of Mrs. Carruthers’ shrimps. The next afternoon, the mystery is how Mrs. Carruthers’ shrimps could possibly have been found in shop C, when she had visited only shops A and B. Some time between The Tuesday Night Club and A Christmas Tragedy, a third mystery is added: what became of Miss Wetherby’s gill of shrimps. Only Miss Marple has enough information to tie all three mysteries together. “A quite unimportant mystery, but absolutely incomprehensible unless one solves it right.”