Marple, Miss, is a popular English amateur detective created by the English author Agatha Christie. Miss Marple’s full name is Jane Marple. She is an elderly unmarried woman who lives in the fictional English village of St. Mary Mead. Many of her cases take place there. Christie described Miss Marple as a tall old lady with a wrinkled face and blue eyes. Miss Marple shrewdly solves her cases through observation. She often gains essential information from an analysis of village gossip. She is sometimes assisted by her nephew, an English novelist named Raymond West.
Christie introduced Miss Marple in a group of six short stories serialized in magazines in 1928. The character appears in 12 novels, beginning with The Murder at the Vicarage (1930). Miss Marple has been featured in several motion pictures and television series. Many actresses have played the character, notably Margaret Rutherford, who starred in four Miss Marple films from 1961 to 1964.
