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HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
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.
Anne Hart asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
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Source ISBN: 9780008340285
Ebook Edition © May 2019 ISBN: 9780007396566
Version: 2019-04-06
For a very dear aunt,
Anita Elliott Baird,
whom Miss Marple would have
enjoyed knowing
CONTENTS
Copyright
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
About the Author
Also by Anne Hart
About the Publisher
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
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
