Clues to Christie: The Definitive Guide to Miss Marple, Hercule Poirot and all of Agatha Christie’s Mysteries

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Agatha Christie. Clues to Christie: The Definitive Guide to Miss Marple, Hercule Poirot and all of Agatha Christie’s Mysteries

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CLUES TO CHRISTIE

The Definitive Guide to

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Jane Marple made an inauspicious debut in the short story “The Tuesday Night Club,” published in December 1927. There, she is described as dressed completely in black and having “faded blue eyes, benignant and kindly” and she is knitting “something white and soft and fleecy.” Despite being overlooked by the armchair detectives gathered together in her house in St. Mary Mead to discuss unsolved mysteries, she is shown to be the most acute and observant of them all. Her unorthodox style of detection is based on her village parallels, small and seemingly insignificant events familiar to her from a lifetime of village living, which she adopts as a basis for comparison when faced with more sinister events.

Although her detective career is less extensive than Poirot, covering twelve novels and twenty short stories, Miss Marple’s status as the most famous female detective in literature is assured. There was a twelve-year gap, from 1930 to 1942, between her first and second book-length investigations, The Murder at the Vicarage and The Body in the Library. Her greatest case, A Murder Is Announced, was Agatha Christie’s fiftieth title and the occasion of a celebratory party at the Savoy Hotel in London in June 1950. Miss Marple travelled to the West Indies for her only foreign case, A Caribbean Mystery, in 1964, and to London to solve a murder At Bertram’s Hotel (1965).

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