Miss Marple

Jane Marple, usually known as Miss Marple, is a fictional character appearing in many Agatha Christie novels.

Personality

When we first meet Jane Marple she is very much the stereotypical spinster of the last century - blue-eyed and frail, wearing a black lace cap and mittens, and constantly knitting. She is also a gleeful gossip and not especially nice. The first Marple novel, The Murder at the Vicarage sees a markedly different Marple to the one who would appear in later books, as she modernized and became nicer over the years.

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A Murder is Announced (1950), Agatha Christie's fiftieth novel, is regarded by some as the best Miss Marple novel, and one of the best of Christie's whodunnits.

Related Topics:
A Murder is Announced - 1950 - Whodunnit

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Miss Marple is able to solve difficult crimes not only because of her shrewd intelligence, but because St. Mary Mead, over her lifetime, has put on a pageant of human depravity rivaled only by that of Sodom and Gomorrah. No crime can arise without reminding Miss Marple of some parallel incident in the history of her time.

Related Topics:
Sodom - Gomorrah

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As with her other famous detective Hercule Poirot, Christie wrote a concluding novel to her Marple series, Sleeping Murder, in 1940 and saved it for her old age, causing some embarrassing discrepancies as people who were written off as dead (such as Dolly Bantry's husband, Colonel Arthur Bantry) by the time her mystery "Nemesis" was published, which was the preceding Marple mystery but actually the last one written, appear alive in Sleeping Murder having been resurrected from the fictional dead. Sleeping Murder was published in 1976, shortly after Christie's death, and was the last of her novels to be published, although, again, it was written in 1940.

Related Topics:
Hercule Poirot - 1940 - 1976

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