This is the only story I have read by Marion Arnott, and I know very little about her, other than that she is (or was) a history teacher at St. Andrew’s Academy in Paisley, Scotland. ’Marbles’ was shortlisted for the Crime Writer’s Association Short Dagger Award in 2002; Arnott had won the previous year with ’Prussian Snowdrops’ and she was also nominated for a British Fantasy Award in 2007 for ‘The Little Drummer Boy’.

In ’Marbles’, the main character is Miss Buchan, “sallow, middle-aged”, who uncharacteristically seems to take an interest in her new neighbour, Ken. He, attractive and approachable, is known by his first name and makes friends easily, he and his dog, Cara. Miss Buchan, not friendly enough with anyone for them to use her first name, is seen as shy or standoffish, unattractive, and gauche, even “daft”. Her behaviour around Ken is peculiar, both intensely timid and yet stalkerish. Given her gaucheness, her perceived plainness, and her lack of social grace, she and her ‘obsession’ become matters of mockery.

In her diary entries, Miss Buchan comments that “[p]eople are like cloth: nothing in themselves, and before they know what’s happening, they’re folded and sheared and snipped into shape.” Her neighbours turn her into a figure of fun because they think that they are correctly reading the signs, that there can only be one reason for her behaviour. It has nothing to do with the ‘cloth’ Miss Buchan, it is the pattern they have pinned to her: since she is a woman who reached middle-age without a husband or family, her interest in Ken must be romantic, “Last Chance Syndrome”, an “old maid’s” lurching towards love. She writes of Ken that he has “such a face—unforgettable”, and even this apparent praise has more than one meaning. She puts everything into her diary, saying that “a record is pointless if things are missed out”, and so she records her responses to Ken and her apparent stalking of him, along with, very obliquely, her memories from childhood.

The diary, though, is not just her recollections, or her attempts to create a monument of sorts to her thoughts and beliefs. It becomes a means through which she begins to find a way to negotiate the kind of person she is (the result of some very nasty patterns around which she was ‘snipped’) and the actions she feels she must take. She is in some ways aware of how she is perceived by other people. But her diary entries reveal firstly a full world of which her neighbours are ignorant (or may be, Miss Buchan does not know the identity of her callers), and subsequently an overweening obligation to act, though in what way she initially cannot decide. The diary ultimately shines a clear light through the layers of obfuscation, recollection, and assumption, built up by Miss Buchan and her neighbours, dropping hints that later turn from lovelorn sighs into signposts: of Ken she writes “How organised he is. Cara draws people to him and K charms them into staying.”

In an interview with The Scotsman in 2001 (after she had won the CWA award, though the paper was careful to mention her age, her marital status, and the number of children she had; thanks for that), Arnott mentioned two characteristics of stories that interest her. One is the way in which criminals reflect the values of the society in which they live, and the other is the tension between a reprehensible reality and an underlying apparent respectability.

‘Marbles’ is a sophisticated engagement with both ideas, but particularly the latter. It is a subtly layered narrative, with many facets to who is being ‘created’ by those who interact with them (including the reader, facing the twist at the end), to what is being hidden and how.

First published in The Best British Mysteries, ed. Maxim Jakubowski, Allison & Busby, 2003