Updated 2 Nov 2024
Miss Jane Marple an elderly, white-haired spinster living quietly in the placid English village of St. Mary Meade, makes her debut in 1928 in the short story "The Tuesday Night Club" in which a group of six people take turns telling stories of mysterious events which only the story teller knows the outcome. Miss Marple surprisingly is the best of the lot of them, coming up with the correct solution every time.
Miss Marple herself does not find this odd because she believes that human nature is pretty much the same everywhere and that people tend to behave in predictable patterns. She uses everyday, commonplace events from village life to discern these patterns of human behavior and solve the mysteries.
We learn more about Miss Marple and the village of St. Mary Meade and its inhabitants in Murder At The Vicarage when she helps the police identify the perpetrator of the murder of Colonel Protheroe. One of my favorite Miss Marple books is The Moving Finger, set in a peaceful English village beset with the venom spread by an anonymous letter writer. The vicar's wife decides to call in a specialist in human wickedness to sort it out and summons Miss Marple, who does just that.
In re-reading these books, I found it interesting that Agatha Christie took care to keep her social environment up to date, with solitary villages giving way to sprawling suburban housing developments and rail and bus transport losing out to a culture largely dependent on automobile transportation, but that Miss Marple is able to take it all in her stride and continue to rely on her knowledge of human nature and behavior, no matter what the cultural context she finds it in.
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