Jane Marple

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.

Books featuring Miss Marple

• The Murder at the Vicarage[?] (1930)
• The Body in the Library[?] (1942)
• A Murder is Announced[?] (1950)
• Murder With Mirrors[?] (1952)
• A Pocketful of Rye[?] (1953)
• 4.50 from Paddington[?] (1957)
• The Mirror Crack'd from Side to Side (1962)
• A Caribbean Mystery[?] (1964)
• At Bertram's Hotel[?] (1965)
• Nemesis[?] (1971)
• Sleeping Murder (1976)

Movies

• Murder, She Said (aka Meet Miss Marple (1961)
• Murder at the Gallop (1963)
• Murder Most Foul (1964)
• Murder Ahoy (1964)

Television

There was a long-running and popular UK TV series in the 1980s with Joan Hickson[?] as Miss Marple, which dramatised many of the original books. It was also televised in Germany. The television show followed the plots of the books considerably more closely than did the Rutherford films.

Angela Lansbury played Miss Marple in the film of The Mirror Crack'd. She later appeared in a television show, Murder, She Wrote that to some degree was based on Miss Marple and another Christie character, Ariadne Oliver[?], a detective story author who attempts to solve crimes.

Quotation

• "The young people think the old people are fools, but the old people know the young people are fools." -- Miss Marple's motto, in several of the books and stories.

Related Topics

• Hercule Poirot
• detective fiction