Agatha Christie’s Marple. Anne Hart

of her life as a young woman, her middle age, or how she came to her appointed place as the resident sleuth of St Mary Mead. One would like to speculate, to imagine something vaguely heroic, perhaps, but it is all explained as much as it will ever be, I suspect, by scattered references to home nursing. ‘I am used to sick people,’ she once said. ‘I have had a great deal to do with them in my time.’ On another occasion we are told: ‘Long experience of nursing made Miss Marple almost automatically straighten the sheet and tuck it under the mattress on her side of the bed.’

      ‘Long experience of nursing …’ From this single phrase emerges a picture of the unmarried daughter, the once pink-and-white eager girl, who stayed at home in some provincial town to gradually become, as the years passed, the companion and nurse of her parents in their old age. She also became, as we shall see, the real or honorary favourite aunt – sometimes doting, sometimes vinegary – of a number of people.

      Few would regard all this as an exciting life, but nowhere is there any hint that Miss Marple considered herself a martyr. She did, however, once confide to a lonely person:

      ‘I know what you mean … One is alone when the last one who remembers is gone. I have nephews and nieces and kind friends – but there’s no one who belongs to the old days. I’ve been alone for quite a long time now.’

      Behold her, then: Miss Jane Marple, her parents dead, her sister dead, her jolly aunts and uncles long gone to their proper rest. She is living alone in genteel and thrifty old age in the quiet village of St Mary Mead, the possessor of a small but pretty Victorian house no doubt purchased from a modest inheritance left her some years before by her dear parents.

      It is the 1930s – or is it the 1920s? – and she is about to embark on an amazing career.

* It is interesting to recall that Caroline Sheppard, Miss Marple’s progenitor, had, for a short and interesting time, Hercule Poirot as a neighbour, a person whom Miss Marple herself apparently never met.