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She lives in the little village of St. Mary Mead. She looks like an ordinary spinster, in tweed and with a curiosity as wide as the world, but when it comes to solving mysteries, she turns out to have a sharp logical mind. In the best detective story tradition, she often embarrasses the local "professional" police, usually by making an analogy with some village occurrence or character.
Miss Marple first appeared in a series of six short stories in Britain's The Sketch magazine. She was a member of the Tuesday Club, a discussion group that met in the quiet Kentish village of St. Mary Meade to discuss unsolved crimes. Other members included the vicar; Miss Marple's nephew, Raymond West, a successful novelist; his fiancee Joyce, an artist; and others. However, it was Miss Marple who always arrived at the solutions to the crimes. These short stories were collected with seven others written especially for the volume as The Thirteen Problems (1932, U.S. title The Tuesday Club Murders), two years after Miss Marple's first novel appearance, in Murder at the Vicarage (1930).
Miss Marple was not the first spinster detective - that honor belonged to Anna Katherine Green 's Amelia Butterworth - but she is the one everyone thinks of when the concept arises. Miss Marple was based on Christie's own grandmother, a pleasant woman who nevertheless, according to Christie, "expected the worst of everyone and everything" and was usually right. A precursor of the character in Christie's own work is Caroline Shepherd in the Hercule Poirot novel The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926). A spinster like Marple, Shepherd has the same interest in gossip and the same knack for knowing what's going on. She lacks only the detective genius of her successor.
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. She modernizes and becomes nicer over the years - there are twelve years between the first Marple novel and the second, The Body in the Library (1942), although some short story appearances intervened.
A Murder is Announced (1950), Agatha Christie's fiftieth novel, is generally regarded as the best Miss Marple novel, and one of the best of all whodunnits.
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.
As with Poirot, Christie wrote a concluding novel to her series in 1940 and saved it for her old age. Sleeping Murder (1977) appeared the year after Christie's death.
Miss Marple has also appeared in movies. Margaret Rutherford played her four times:
The first of these was based on the novel 4.50 from Paddington, the next two were based on novels featuring Hercule Poirot, and the last was not based on any of Christie's works.
Miss Marple was then played by Angela LansburyAngela Lansbury (born October 16, 1925) is a British-born American actress and the granddaughter of politician George Lansbury. Murder, She Wrote''. She made her Academy Award nominated film debut in 1944, in the Charles Boyer/ Ingrid Bergman film Gasligh in: