Miss Marple

Miss Marple along with Hercule Poirot is the one of the most famous fictional detectives created by Agatha Christie. Her sharp intelligence, her unobtrusive nature and her panache for solving murder mysteries makes her stand in the same league as Holmes, Poirot, HM, Dr. Gideon Fell and Byomkesh Bakshi. She is not a detective by profession unlike Poirot or Holmes but an amateur who can match intellectual prowess with the very best in detective fiction.

Jane Marple is an old bachelorette who lives alone in St. Mary Mead. She often uses her village life experiences to draw analogies with crime. Miss Marple was created by the Queen of Crime Agatha Christie in "The Sketch" in 1926, which later became the first chapter of The Thirteen Problems. Her first appearance in a full-length novel was in The Murder at the Vicarage in 1930.

Miss Marple books are generally regarded as Cozy Mysteries and most of them are workable, fun and easy to read mysteries. Miss Marple is one of those detectives who is not featured very prominently in her own novels, she usually keeps making brief appearances in her stories and comes up with a solution to the mystery in the end.

Margaret Rutherford is the quintessential Miss Marple for some people, she played the female detective in the "Murder, She Said" in 1961(based on 4:50 from Paddington) and  "Murder at the Gallop" (1963), based on the 1953 Hercule Poirot novel After the Funeral.

For others Joan Hickson who appeared in the BBC TV Series Miss Marple is the quintessential Miss Marple. I have no personal favorites as I find books to be much more entertaining then anything which appears on the idiot box.

I intend to use this page to serve as a bibliography for all the Miss Marple books that I have read and links to their reviews. In total there are 12 Novels featuring Miss Marple and 2 short story collections. I have read most of these books and will keep linking those which I read in the future.

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)

The Thirteen Problems (short story collection featuring Miss Marple, also published as The Tuesday Club Murders) (1932)
Miss Marple's Final Cases and Two Other Stories (short stories collected posthumously, also published as Miss Marple's Final Cases, but only six of the eight stories actually feature Miss Marple) (written between 1939 and 1954, published 1979)


here is my list of the best Miss Marple book.