Miss Marple of St. Mary Mead
Agatha Christie's Redoutable Spinster Sleuth
Miss Marple, a character created by the “Queen of Crime” Agatha Christie, is a harmless old village biddy, who happens to count solving crime amongst her hobbies, alongside knitting and gossiping.
St. Mary Mead
Unlike Agatha Christie’s other famous detective Hercule Poirot, Miss Marple has no official connection to detective work, and has always lived in the quiet English country village of St. Mary Mead. This long experience of the intrigues and scandals of a small community has given her an insight into human nature which she uses to solve the cases she finds herself mixed up in. As she explains, human nature is much the same everywhere, and she can always find a bucolic village parallel to the most sensational crime.
The Wider World
Though she lives very quietly, Miss Marple is acquainted with many people in the world beyond St. May Mead – one character describes her s having “the Chief Constables of five counties in her pocket.” It is through these connections which Miss Marple’s cases often arrive, brought to her by friends such as the solicitor Dr. Petherick, the policeman Sir Henry Clithering, the local landowner Colonel Bantry or her famous nephew the novelist Raymond West. Raymond is rather inclined to patronise his kindly and apparently unworldly aunt, who is in awe of the “very clever” modern novels he writes about all kinds of unpleasantness which would never have been mentioned in her youth. It is the shrewd and Victorian-minded Miss Marple, however, who always has the last laugh, frequently demonstrating that Raymond and his artistic wife Joyce are, despite their fashionable cynicism, rather idealistic.
The Thirteen Problems
Though Miss Marple appeared in many novels, (including the iconic Murder at the Vicarage and The Body In The Library) the short story collection entitled The Thirteen Problems shows her at her most typical. The collection is based on the idea that a group of friends tell each other strange and puzzling stories in turn, to which only they know the answer, and the rest of the group attempts to solve the problem. Though the stories involve various kinds of crime, mayhem and fraud, in each case it is Miss Marple who identifies the culprit with a parochial analogy.
Miss Marple has been portrayed on screen by actresses as various as Gracie Fields, Angela Landsbury, Margaret Rutherford, Helen Hayes and Joan Hickson. A new BBC television series based on her character is currently being screened, with many of the plots altered and updated, starring Geraldine McEwan.
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