They could draw on characters and situations that occurred in any of the Marple novels and short stories, but weren’t allowed to incorporate characters or events from any of Christie’s non-Marple books, nor to invent any backstory upon which Christie herself had not touched.įoley’s story, Evil in Small Places, finds Marple visiting an old school friend as the village she lives in celebrates its version of Halloween. Firstly, the stories had to be set within the period covered by Agatha Christie’s own Miss Marple fiction. Marple’s 12 writers, who also include British crime writers Elly Griffiths and Ruth Ware, Israeli-American fantasy author Leigh Bardugo and New York Times bestselling novelist Jean Kwok, were given certain criteria. And, Mosse notes, the stories have “nothing to do with who she marries or who she loves”. Miss Marple stands out, being one of the few “great enduring characters” of her demographic. “I do think the invisibility of older women is still an issue,” the Labyrinth author said. She is also an “extraordinarily subversive character”, Mosse added, due to being an “old woman who’s there in her own right”. Mitchell said Miss Marple was a “cracking character” who was “rocking it for single ladies, for post-menopausal women”, while Mosse called her “one of the great unsung heroines of literature”. “She’s patronised, she’s overlooked, she’s slighted yet she runs rings around everyone.”

Miss Marple is a “feminist icon in a way”, according to Foley. She was partly based on Christie’s grandmother and her grandmother’s friends, although Christie wrote that her fictional sleuth was “far more fussy and spinsterish than my grandmother ever was”. The first full-length Miss Marple novel was The Murder at the Vicarage in 1930, and the character went on to appear in a total of 12 novels and 20 short stories. Jane Marple first appeared in 1927 in the short story The Tuesday Night Club, which was included in the collection The Thirteen Problems.

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