Miss Marple

A Surprising Detective

For a woman who has spent her life in the small village of St Mary Mead, Miss Marple is surprisingly worldly. She has every opportunity to observe human nature – as she often points out, “There is a great deal of wickedness in village life.”

What makes Miss Marple so effective as a detective is her ability to blend into the background, and for her shrewd intelligence to be hidden behind her love of knitting, gardening and gossip; unassuming and often overlooked, she has the freedom to pursue the truth . Criminals and murderers fail to realise that with every stitch she is not only making a cardigan, but solving a crime. “The finest detective God ever made. Natural genius cultivated in suitable soil." (Sir Henry Clithering, The Body in the Library)

The Creation

Miss Marple first came into being in 1927 in The Tuesday Night Club, a short story pulled together into the collection The Thirteen Problems. It was first published in the December 1927 issue of Royal Magazine. Christie never expected Miss Marple to rival Poirot in the public’s affections but since the publication of The Murder at the Vicarage in 1930, Marple's first full length novel, readers were hooked.

While Agatha Christie acknowledged that her grandmother had been a huge influence on the character, she writes that Miss Marple was "far more fussy and spinsterish than my grandmother ever was. But one thing she did have in common with her – though a cheerful person, she always expected the worst of everyone and everything, and was, with almost frightening accuracy, usually proved right." Mellowing with appearances (if not with age) Miss Marple graced twelve novels and twenty short stories during her career as an amateur detective, never paid and not always thanked. The Miss Marple of The Thirteen Problems is decidedly more shrewish and Victorian than the later character, who is often more forgiving. She certainly changes with the times, even down to wearing plimsolls in 1964’s A Caribbean Mystery.

Miss Marple never married and her closest living relatives are her nephews and nieces. Her nephew, the well-known author Raymond West and his wife Joan (initially Joyce) crop up most commonly in her stories. Marple also employs a selection of maids, all young women from the nearby orphanage, training them in her Victorian way.

Playing Marple

Many great actors have taken on the role of Marple. The 1960s saw four MGM film adaptations starring friend of the family Margaret Rutherford, although many of these were only loosely based on Agatha Christie’s novels (and two originally involved Poirot). Christie wasn’t too keen on Rutherford's comic version of Marple, who even had a cameo in the 1965 Poirot spoof The Alphabet Murders. The more austere representation of Marple by Angela Lansbury in the 1980 adaptation, The Mirror Crack’d, might have been more to Christie’s tastes. The 1980s also saw Helen Hayes in three Miss Marple TV films, as a sprightlier sleuth.

Joan Hickson’s portrayal in the BBC series from 1984 to 1992 is often considered most faithful to the original character, and Hickson also reads many of the audiobooks. June Whitfield starred as the BBC Radio 4 Marple, from 1993 to 2001, and it was in 2004 that Geraldine McEwan reprised the role for the ITV adaptations, with Julia McKenzie taking over in 2009.

Explore Miss Marple on the stage, screen and radio