Miss Marple
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- This article is about the character. For other uses, see Marple.
Jane Marple, usually known as Miss Marple, is a fictional character appearing in 12 Agatha Christie crime novels. She is one of the most famous of Christie's detectives, along with Poirot. Miss Marple is an elderly spinster who acts as an amateur detective, and lives in the village of St. Mary Mead. She has been portrayed numerous times on screen.
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[edit] Personality
Miss Marple 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 detective story tradition, she often embarrasses the local "professional" police, usually by making an analogy with some village occurrence or character.
When we first meet Jane Marple she is very much the stereotypical spinster of the 19th 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. The first Marple novel, The Murder at the Vicarage sees a markedly different Marple from the one who would appear in later books, as she modernized and became nicer over the years.
Miss Marple's nephew, the "well-known author" Raymond West and his wife Joan (who first appeared as Joyce), a modern artist, were introduced in 1933 in The Thirteen Problems. Raymond, in particular, is overconfident of himself and dismissive of Miss Marple's mental powers, though she continually upstages him in the end. Cherry Baker lives with Miss Marple in her last years.
A Murder is Announced (1950), Christie's fiftieth novel, is regarded by some as the best Miss Marple novel, and one of the best of Christie's whodunits.
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 her other famous detective Hercule Poirot, Christie wrote a concluding novel to her Marple series, Sleeping Murder, in 1940. This was preserved in a bank vault, initially in case she was killed in The Blitz, and it was finally published shortly after Christie's death in 1976, some thirty-six years after it was written. Sleeping Murder created some discrepancies as people who were killed off by Christie in previously published novels, such as Dolly Bantry's husband Arthur, were seemingly brought back to life.
The name Miss Marple was derived from the name of the railway station in Marple, Cheshire, on the Manchester to Sheffield Hope Valley line, at which Agatha Christie was once delayed.
[edit] Novels featuring Miss Marple
- The Murder at the Vicarage (1930)
- The Body in the Library (1942)
- The Moving Finger (1943)
- A Murder is Announced (1950)
- They Do It with Mirrors, or Murder With Mirrors (1952)
- A Pocket Full of Rye (1953)
- 4.50 from Paddington, or What Mrs. McGillicuddy Saw! (1957)
- The Mirror Crack'd from Side to Side, or The Mirror Crack'd (1962)
- A Caribbean Mystery (1964)
- At Bertram's Hotel (1965)
- Nemesis (1971)
- Sleeping Murder (written around 1940, published 1976)
[edit] Miss Marple Short Story Collections
- The Thirteen Problems (Short Story Collection featuring Miss Marple, also published as The Tuesday Club Murders.) (1933)
- Miss Marple's Final Cases and Two Other Stories (Short Stories Collected Posthumously, also published as Miss Marple's Final Cases and Two Other Stories as only six of the eight stories actually feature Miss Marple) (written between 1939 and 1954, published 1979)
Miss Marple also appears in Greenshaw's Folly, a short story traditionally included as part of the Poirot collection The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding,
[edit] Books about Miss Marple
- The Life and Times of Miss Jane Marple -- a biography by Anne Hart
[edit] 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.
[edit] Movies
[edit] Margaret Rutherford
Although popular from her first appearance in 1930, Jane Marple had to wait thirty-two years for her first big-screen appearance. When she made it, the results were found disappointing to Christie purists and Christie herself. Murder, She Said (1962, directed by George Pollock) was the first of four British MGM productions starring Dame Margaret Rutherford, a magnificent comic actress but too boisterous and loud to fit the prim and birdlike character Christie created in her novels. This first film was based on the 1957 novel 4:50 from Paddington (U.S. title, What Mrs. McGillicuddy Saw!), and the changes made in the plot were typical of the series. In the film, Mrs. McGillicuddy does not see anything because there is no Mrs. McGillicuddy. Miss Marple herself sees an apparent murder committed on a train running alongside hers. Likewise, it is Miss Marple herself who poses as a maid to find out the facts of the case, not a young friend of hers who has made a business of it.
The other Rutherford films (all directed by George Pollock) were Murder at the Gallop (1963), based on the 1953 Hercule Poirot novel After the Funeral; Murder Most Foul (1964), based on the 1952 Poirot novel Mrs McGinty's Dead; and Murder Ahoy! (1964), not based on any Christie work. Rutherford also appeared briefly as Miss Marple in the spoof Hercule Poirot adventure The Alphabet Murders (1965). It is interesting to note that in Germany all of these films have reached an immense television popularity and that Miss Marple is generally identified with Rutherford's quirky portrayal.
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Miss Marple Murder films with Margaret Rutherford
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Films Murder, She Said | Murder at the Gallop | Murder Most Foul | Murder Ahoy! Based on the Agatha Christie novels 4.50 from Paddington | After the Funeral | Mrs. McGinty's Dead |
Cast Margaret Rutherford | Stringer Davis | Bud Tingwell Crew George Pollock | Ron Goodwin |
[edit] Angela Lansbury
In 1980, Angela Lansbury played Miss Marple in The Mirror Crack'd (EMI, directed by Guy Hamilton), based on Christie's 1962 novel. However, Lansbury is only on screen for a short time, the bulk of the film being taken up with the machinations of an all-star cast that included Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson, Geraldine Chaplin, Tony Curtis, and Kim Novak. Edward Fox appeared as Inspector Craddock, who did Miss Marple's legwork.
[edit] Helen Hayes
American stage and screen legend Helen Hayes portrayed Miss Marple in two American made-for-TV movies, both for CBS: A Caribbean Mystery (1983) and Murder with Mirrors (1984). Sue Grafton contributed to the screenplay of the former. Hayes's Marple was benign and chirpy.
[edit] Television and radio
American TV was the setting for the first dramatic portrayal of Miss Marple. Gracie Fields, a legendary British actress, played the geriatric sleuth in a 1956 episode of Goodyear TV Playhouse based on A Murder Is Announced, the 1950 Christie novel.
[edit] Joan Hickson
From 1984 to 1992, the BBC adapted all of the original Miss Marple novels, each one with Joan Hickson in the lead role. These episodes followed the plots more closely than previous adaptations.
[edit] Radio
BBC Radio 4 dramatised all of the novels with June Whitfield as Miss Marple.
[edit] Angela Lansbury
Angela Lansbury, after playing Miss Marple in The Mirror Crack'd, went on to star in the TV series Murder, She Wrote as Jessica Fletcher, a novelist who solves crimes. The character was to some degree based on Miss Marple and another Christie character, Ariadne Oliver.
[edit] Geraldine McEwan
In 2004, ITV first broadcast new adaptations of Agatha Christie's books under the title Agatha Christie's Marple, usually referred to as Marple, with Geraldine McEwan in the lead role. Two series have so far aired, with a third airing in 2007.
[edit] Animated
From 2004 to 2005, Japanese TV network NHK produced a 39 episode anime series titled Agatha Christie's Great Detectives Poirot and Marple, which combined Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot.
[edit] External links
- Will The Real Miss Marple Please Stand Up (All-About-Agatha-Christie.com)
