Jane Marple

Agatha Christie said that the character of Miss Marple was inspired by Dr Sheppard’s shrewd and shrewish sister in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd and certain friends of her grandmother – and indeed her own grandmother – of whom Agatha Christie once said “[she] expected the worst of everyone and everything and was with almost frightening accuracy, usually proved right.”

The name Miss Marple was derived from the name of the railway station in Marple, on the Manchester to Sheffield Hope Valley line, at which Agatha Christie was once delayed long enough to have actually noticed the sign.

The elderly spinster from the fictitious village of St. Mary Mead is a tall, thin woman of between 65 and 70 years of age. She has white snowy hair, pale blue eyes, and a pinkish wrinkled face. She looks like an ordinary old lady, dressed neatly in tweed and is often seen carrying knitting needles and yarn. Two of her hobbies (and subjects of conversation) are bird watching and gardening.

Although she looks like a sweet, frail old woman, Miss Marple is not afraid of dead bodies and is not easily intimidated. She also has a remarkable ability to latch onto a casual comment and connect it to the case at hand. Drawing parallels between the everyday mysteries that puzzle her neighbours, and cases of national importance, Miss Marple's logical mind pieces together the clues with unnerving accuracy. In the detective story tradition, she often embarrasses the local "professional" police by solving mysteries that have them stumped.

When she created Miss Marple, Agatha said that she did not expect that she would continue writing about her for the rest of her life but from the moment that this “typical old maid of fiction” made her first appearance, Christie’s readers were hooked. Miss Marple appeared in a total of twelve novels and 20 short stories and celebrated her 75th anniversary in 2005.