What’s so special about Miss Seeton?
A Happy New Year to all Miss Seeton's readers, followers, and friends!
Miss Seeton's 25th adventure, Watch the Wall, Miss Seeton, will be published in February 2019.
If you have never read a Miss Seeton, you may have arrived here because you enjoy Miss Marple, and want to know whether Miss Emily Seeton is a similar character to the better-known Jane. Well, the answer is a qualified Yes ... with a rather more emphatic No!
It's now 50 years since the first Miss Seeton mystery appeared and, after reading Picture Miss Seeton, Ogden Nash, that master of humorous light verse, declared the little spinster to be “the most delightfully satisfactory character since Miss Marple”.
Some readers have been confused by this remark. They expect Miss Seeton to be just like Miss Marple but, while Ogden Nash enjoyed both characters, he knew that they were distinct.
There are of course similarities.
— Miss Marple and Miss Seeton, both unmarried ladies of a certain class and breeding, are both past retirement age.
— Miss Marple and Miss Seeton are both village-dwellers, each in her own cottage with its garden.
— Miss Marple and Miss Seeton both have contacts in the police force ...
And that’s about it!
The many differences between them are what make Miss Seeton so very special.
— Miss Marple is an elderly lady of limited but independent means. Miss Seeton has only recently retired, but needs to augment her teacher’s pension; fortunately she's often employed as a Special Art Consultant to Scotland Yard.
— Miss Marple has a maid; Miss Seeton has a “daily woman” twice a week.
— Miss Marple knits; Miss Seeton does yoga.
— Miss Marple lives in St Mary Mead, but only three of the twelve novels about her are set there; Miss Seeton lives in Plummergen, and the majority of her 25 adventures are based there.
— Miss Marple is so unobtrusive that she can come and go pretty much unnoticed. Miss Seeton is noticed and talked about almost everywhere she goes (not least the Plummergen Post Office) and, under her soubriquet of The Battling Brolly, has been frequently mentioned in the press.
— Miss Marple is universally popular in her world, but even in Miss Seeton’s own village there's a vocal group of conspiracy theorists convinced that no truly innocent person can possibly be the subject of so many encounters with the police.
— Few of Miss Marple's neighbours appear in more than one novel; many of Miss Seeton's neighbours appear in several novels, and some in nearly all of them.
— Miss Marple solves crimes by drawing parallels with the trivia of village life. Miss Seeton draws too, but she draws pictures. These pictures are swift, intuitive sketches she refers to as "scribbles" and they help the police to solve crimes, but Miss Seeton herself doesn't actively solve anything.
— Miss Marple lives a calm, quiet, retiring existence. Miss Seeton believes that she lives a calm and quiet existence, and always thinks that some mistake must surely have been made whenever she is the object of (say) a kidnapping, or an attempted murder.
— Miss Marple may carry an umbrella when the weather demands it, but Miss Seeton carries an umbrella regardless of the weather. And in her hands the umbrella, like the pencils she uses for her lightning sketches, can produce surprising results.
— Perhaps the fundamental difference between these two English gentlewomen is that Miss Marple believes in the existence of Evil, and sees it at work in murder cases. Miss Seeton, despite numerous corpses, multiple crimes, and several attacks upon her own person, has never been entirely convinced, and prefers to think the best of everyone if she possibly can.
Back in 1986 Neysa Chouteau wrote a perceptive analysis of Heron Carvic's original five Miss Seeton adventures. It was called The Singular Miss Seeton, and it mentions an article by Heron Carvic himself in Dilys Winn's Murder Ink. Miss Seeton's creator felt that Miss Marple’s crime-solving success must be based on a strong element of intuition, and concluded that he must endow Miss Seeton with an even stronger form of psychic ability if she in her turn was to be of assistance to the police.
This psychic ability allows Miss Seeton to produce the intuitive drawings that so much disconcert her, as she feels that as an artist she should draw only what she sees. She doesn't realise that, as she draws, she is seeing beyond apparent reality to the ultimate truth. Fortunately the police — in particular “that nice Mr Delphick” — are invariably able to interpret her scribbles and arrive at that truth, thereby solving the case about which they have consulted her.
Whatever slanders her detractors may utter, Miss Seeton can’t believe anyone is talking about her. Why should they? After all, she leads such a quiet life. It is easy to see why she thinks this. Whenever villains threaten, their plans will somehow go awry. Nothing worse than the occasional drenching in a pond or canal ever befalls her, and even then she will insist that any such drenching was the result of her own carelessness — and certainly isn't the result of any deliberate action against her on the part of anyone else.
Perhaps what makes Miss Seeton most special is our confidence that her adventures will never keep us awake at night. She reassures us. She convinces us that life need not be as awful as the news media wish us to believe.
Long may she continue to do so!
Miss Seeton's 25th adventure, Watch the Wall, Miss Seeton, will be published in February 2019.
If you have never read a Miss Seeton, you may have arrived here because you enjoy Miss Marple, and want to know whether Miss Emily Seeton is a similar character to the better-known Jane. Well, the answer is a qualified Yes ... with a rather more emphatic No!
It's now 50 years since the first Miss Seeton mystery appeared and, after reading Picture Miss Seeton, Ogden Nash, that master of humorous light verse, declared the little spinster to be “the most delightfully satisfactory character since Miss Marple”. Some readers have been confused by this remark. They expect Miss Seeton to be just like Miss Marple but, while Ogden Nash enjoyed both characters, he knew that they were distinct.
There are of course similarities.
— Miss Marple and Miss Seeton, both unmarried ladies of a certain class and breeding, are both past retirement age.
— Miss Marple and Miss Seeton are both village-dwellers, each in her own cottage with its garden.
— Miss Marple and Miss Seeton both have contacts in the police force ...
And that’s about it!
The many differences between them are what make Miss Seeton so very special.
— Miss Marple is an elderly lady of limited but independent means. Miss Seeton has only recently retired, but needs to augment her teacher’s pension; fortunately she's often employed as a Special Art Consultant to Scotland Yard.
— Miss Marple has a maid; Miss Seeton has a “daily woman” twice a week.
— Miss Marple knits; Miss Seeton does yoga.
— Miss Marple lives in St Mary Mead, but only three of the twelve novels about her are set there; Miss Seeton lives in Plummergen, and the majority of her 25 adventures are based there.
— Miss Marple is so unobtrusive that she can come and go pretty much unnoticed. Miss Seeton is noticed and talked about almost everywhere she goes (not least the Plummergen Post Office) and, under her soubriquet of The Battling Brolly, has been frequently mentioned in the press.
— Miss Marple is universally popular in her world, but even in Miss Seeton’s own village there's a vocal group of conspiracy theorists convinced that no truly innocent person can possibly be the subject of so many encounters with the police.
— Few of Miss Marple's neighbours appear in more than one novel; many of Miss Seeton's neighbours appear in several novels, and some in nearly all of them.
— Miss Marple solves crimes by drawing parallels with the trivia of village life. Miss Seeton draws too, but she draws pictures. These pictures are swift, intuitive sketches she refers to as "scribbles" and they help the police to solve crimes, but Miss Seeton herself doesn't actively solve anything.
— Miss Marple lives a calm, quiet, retiring existence. Miss Seeton believes that she lives a calm and quiet existence, and always thinks that some mistake must surely have been made whenever she is the object of (say) a kidnapping, or an attempted murder.
— Miss Marple may carry an umbrella when the weather demands it, but Miss Seeton carries an umbrella regardless of the weather. And in her hands the umbrella, like the pencils she uses for her lightning sketches, can produce surprising results.
— Perhaps the fundamental difference between these two English gentlewomen is that Miss Marple believes in the existence of Evil, and sees it at work in murder cases. Miss Seeton, despite numerous corpses, multiple crimes, and several attacks upon her own person, has never been entirely convinced, and prefers to think the best of everyone if she possibly can.
Back in 1986 Neysa Chouteau wrote a perceptive analysis of Heron Carvic's original five Miss Seeton adventures. It was called The Singular Miss Seeton, and it mentions an article by Heron Carvic himself in Dilys Winn's Murder Ink. Miss Seeton's creator felt that Miss Marple’s crime-solving success must be based on a strong element of intuition, and concluded that he must endow Miss Seeton with an even stronger form of psychic ability if she in her turn was to be of assistance to the police.This psychic ability allows Miss Seeton to produce the intuitive drawings that so much disconcert her, as she feels that as an artist she should draw only what she sees. She doesn't realise that, as she draws, she is seeing beyond apparent reality to the ultimate truth. Fortunately the police — in particular “that nice Mr Delphick” — are invariably able to interpret her scribbles and arrive at that truth, thereby solving the case about which they have consulted her.
Whatever slanders her detractors may utter, Miss Seeton can’t believe anyone is talking about her. Why should they? After all, she leads such a quiet life. It is easy to see why she thinks this. Whenever villains threaten, their plans will somehow go awry. Nothing worse than the occasional drenching in a pond or canal ever befalls her, and even then she will insist that any such drenching was the result of her own carelessness — and certainly isn't the result of any deliberate action against her on the part of anyone else.
Perhaps what makes Miss Seeton most special is our confidence that her adventures will never keep us awake at night. She reassures us. She convinces us that life need not be as awful as the news media wish us to believe.
Long may she continue to do so!
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