![]() The crimes involved were often examples of the classic ‘country house mystery’ that Agatha Christie excelled at crafting, and a number of the contributors to Marple have followed a similar approach, also to excellent effect. The majority of Miss Marple’s original cases took place in the domestic sphere, in houses and stately homes to which she was invited by her many old friends and relatives. In addition, she had an unrivalled understanding of human nature, which she developed through spending nearly her whole life in the same small village. ![]() As an elderly unmarried female of moderate means, she was regularly overlooked and underestimated, allowing her to pass unnoticed and use her remarkable powers of observation and inference to ferret out the guilty party whenever a crime occurred in her vicinity. Finally, the authors couldn’t invent any wholly new backstory for Miss Marple.Īlthough the amateur sleuth of more mature years is now a common feature of crime fiction, Miss Marple was a marked departure from the popular image of a detective when first introduced. Second, although the stories could feature characters and events from Christie’s own Miss Marple works, the authors couldn’t incorporate characters or incidences from her non-Marple tales. First, the stories had to take place within the same period in which Christie set her Miss Marple stories. ![]() In Marple: Twelve New Stories, a dozen bestselling contemporary authors each reimagine Miss Marple and provide a new puzzle for her to solve.ĭue to it being the first ‘official’ collection of Miss Marple stories written by anyone other than Agatha Christie, the authors had to ensure that their stories met certain criteria. However, despite Christie’s clear preference, whereas Poirot was officially resurrected in Sophie Hannah’s The Monogram Murders in 2014 and allowed to continue sleuthing, the sharpest mind in St Mary Mead was left to languish in Christie’s back catalogue. From her first appearance in The Tuesday Night Club, a short story published in 1927, through to her final appearance in the 1976 novel Sleeping Murder, Miss Marple solved a host of crimes over the course of 12 novels and 20 short stories, often while sitting in an armchair and knitting. While Agatha Christie eventually grew tired of Hercule Poirot, describing him as ‘an egocentric creep’ and devising a deeply divisive ending for him, she retained her affection for the far more personable Miss Jane Marple. ![]()
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