Re-reading Agatha Christie’s A Murder is Announced this week (it’s the summer holidays! I can relax like anyone else!), I was struck by one of Miss Marple’s wise pronouncements:

And that’s really the particular way the world has changed since the war. Take this place, Chipping Cleghorn, for instance. It’s very much like St Mary Mead where I live. Fifteen years ago one knew who everybody was. The Bantrys in the big house – and the Hartnells and the Price Ridleys and the Weatherbys… They were people whose fathers and mothers and grandfathers and grandmothers, or whose aunts and uncles, had lived there before them. If somebody new came to live there, they brought letters of introduction, or they’d been in the same regiment or served in the same ship as someone there already. If anybody new – really new – really a stranger – came, well, they stuck out – everybody wondered about them and didn’t rest till they found out.

Since 1950, when the book was published, letters of introduction have all but vanished, as anachronistic as spats and stove-pipe hats. I wonder when the last one was written, gravely bestowed on its recipient, and carried reverently (in a battered briefcase, no doubt), bearing hopes of social or financial success.

Decorous and polite, they hark back to an ordered world, and the exchange of reliable information about identity. A tip from the right person could be a conduit into Society, or smooth your way into a job. They boast........

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