MISS JANE MARPLE

"Murder at the Vicarage was published in 1930, but I cannot remember where, when or how I worte it, why I came to write it, or even what suggested to me that I shoud select a new character - Miss Marple - to act as the sleuth in the story. Certainly at the time I had no intention of continuing her for the rest of my life. I did not know that she was to become a rival of Hercule Poirot."
Agatha Christie: An Autobiography

Miss Marple was the star of twelve Christie books, The Murder at the Vicarage, The Body in the Library, The Moving Finger, A Murder is Announced, They Do it with Mirrors, A Pocketful of Rye, 4.50 from Paddington, The Mirror Crack'd from Side to Side, A Caribbean Mystery, At Bertram's Hotel, Nemesis and Sleeping Murder. She also appeared in 20 short stories. She was already an old lady in the first book, as Agatha herself describes in her Autobiography: "Miss Marple wass born at the age of sixty-five to seventy - which, as with Poirot, proved most unfortunate, because she was going to have to last a long time in my life. If I had had any second sight, I would have provided myself with a precocious schoolboy as my first detective; then he could have grown old with me."

Marple is an English spinster and lives in the Englissh village of St. Mary Mead and is not a likely detective but always succeeds where the police have failed. Instead of using a magnifying glass looking for clues she uses her instinct and knowledge of human nature. Margaret Rutherford played Miss Marple in a few movies in the sixties but Joan Hickson is the most famous Miss Marple and appeared in TV series and TV movies, but she also played other roles in other Agatha Christie movies. Helen Hayes and Murder She Wrote's Angela Lansbury have also portrayed Marple.