Agatha Christie’s Marple. Anne Hart

      

      

       COPYRIGHT

      HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

       www.harpercollins.co.uk

      Revised edition published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2019

      Copyright © Anne Hart 1985

      Cover design by Andrew Davidson © HarperCollins/Agatha Christie Ltd 2019

       AGATHA CHRISTIE®, MARPLE® and the Agatha Christie Signature are registered trademarks of Agatha Christie Limited in the UK and elsewhere. All rights reserved.

       www.agathachristie.com

      Anne Hart asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

      A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

      All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

      Source ISBN: 9780008340285

       Ebook Edition © May 2019 ISBN: 9780007396566

       Version: 2019-04-06

       DEDICATION

      For a very dear aunt,

       Anita Elliott Baird,

       whom Miss Marple would have

       enjoyed knowing

      CONTENTS

       Cover

       Title Page

       Copyright

Dedication

       Preface

      1 St Mary Mead

      2 Miss Marple’s Earlier Life

      3 Miss Marple’s Career Begins

      4 The 1930s

      5 Postwar Events

       6 The Four Last Cases

       7 The Essential Miss Marple

       8 A Visit to Miss Marple

       9 Miss Marple at Home

       10 Miss Marple at Large

       11 ‘My Nephew, the Author’ and Other Relatives and Friends

       12 Little Maids All In a Row

       13 Miss Marple as Sleuth

       A Miss Marple Bibliography

       Miss Marple Short Stories

       Miss Marple on Stage, Film, TV and Radio

       Keep Reading

       About the Author

       Also by Anne Hart

       About the Publisher

       PREFACE

      It has been a great pleasure to write this biography of Agatha Christie’s beloved and resilient Miss Marple, the best known of a notable group of women who have played leading roles in detective fiction. Of course, not a word of this book would have been written had not a benevolent genius created Miss Marple in the first place, and I am immensely grateful to Rosalind Hicks, Agatha Christie’s daughter, for giving her kind approval for my use of her mother’s writing in this way.

      Unlike other biographers, I cannot claim to have unearthed new material. Everything we know of Miss Marple is contained in the twelve books and twenty short stories devoted to her remarkable sleuthing. To search through these books and stories, not for murderers but for clues to Miss Marple herself, is the aim of this biography. I hope its readers will enjoy reading it as much as I have enjoyed writing it. Together we are indebted to the incomparable Agatha Christie.

      I am grateful to a number of people who have encouraged me along the way. I would particularly like to thank Susan Hart, Nancy Grenville, David Grenville, and Percy Janes for their helpful advice on the manuscript, and June Mescia, my editor, for her suggestions and good judgment.

      ANNE HART

       1 ST MARY MEAD

      For me, as for many others, the reading of detective stories is an addiction like tobacco or alcohol … the story must conform to certain formulas (I find it very difficult, for example, to read one that is not set in rural England).

      —W. H. Auden, ‘The Guilty Vicarage’

      ‘Give me a nice cup of tea, Aunt Jane, with some thin bread and butter and soothe me with your earliest remembrances of St Mary Mead.’

      —Inspector Craddock, THE MIRROR CRACK’D FROM SIDE TO SIDE

      The pretty village of St Mary Mead will be forever known as the home of Miss Jane Marple, that wonderful sleuth whose creator so cleverly, and for so many years, led us down the garden path. It is impossible, indeed, to imagine St Mary Mead without Miss Marple or Miss Marple without St Mary Mead; it was the archetypal English village created just for her. That for almost fifty years its pleasant homes and byways were so frequently the scenes of crimes has never detracted in the least from its essential cosiness and charm. Before fully introducing Miss Marple, it is first necessary to introduce St Mary Mead.

St Mary Mead lies in the home county of Downshire (occasionally called Radfordshire) and is about twenty-five miles south of London and twelve miles equidistant from Market Basing and the coast at Loomouth.* Danemouth, a fashionable watering place also on the coast, is about eighteen miles from the county town of Much Benham and it, in turn, is two miles from St Mary Mead.†