Other notable Marple selections: The Body in the Library (1942) and The Mirror Crack’d From Side to Side (1962). Mary Mead and an amateur sleuth of deadpan demeanor and formidable skills. The first and utterly pleasurable introduction of Miss Jane Marple, the doyenne of St. Other notable Poirots: Murder on the Orient Express (1934) and Evil Under the Sun (1941).
She would then go back and make the necessary changes to "frame" that person.Even with the benefit of 90 years of hindsight and countless imitators, Christie’s culminating twist in this early Hercule Poirot novel pulls the rug out with a level of audacity that leaves new readers breathless and repeat customers eager to see how she did, indeed, play fair throughout. On an edition of Desert Island Discs in 2007, Brian Aldiss recounted how Agatha Christie told him that she wrote her books up to the last chapter, and then decided who the most unlikely suspect was. Miss Marple fared better than Poirot, since after solving the mystery in Sleeping Murder, she returns home to her regular life in Saint Mary Mead. It may be that Christie simply did not have time to revise the manuscript before she died.
#AGATHA CHRISTIE MISS MARPLE BOOKS SERIES#
This may explain some of the inconsistencies in the book with the rest of the Marple series - for example, Colonel Arthur Bantry, husband of Miss Marple's friend, Dolly, is still alive and well in Sleeping Murder (which, like Curtain, was written in the 1940s) despite the fact he is noted as having died in books that were written after but published before the posthumous release of Sleeping Murder in 1976-such as, The Mirror Crack'd from Side to Side. Poirot is the only fictional character to have been given an obituary in The New York Times, following the publication of Curtain in 1975.įollowing the great success of Curtain, Christie gave permission for the release of Sleeping Murder sometime in 1976, but died in January 1976 before the book could be released. However it is interesting to note that the Belgian detective’s titles outnumber the Marple titles by more than two to one. In contrast, Christie was fond of Miss Marple. She saw herself as an entertainer whose job was to produce what the public liked, and what the public liked was Poirot. However, unlike Conan Doyle, Christie resisted the temptation to kill her detective off while he was still popular.
In fact, by the end of the 1930s, Christie confided to her diary that she was finding Poirot “insufferable”, and by the 1960s she felt that he was an "an ego-centric creep". Like Arthur Conan Doyle, Christie was to become increasingly tired of her detective, Poirot. These publications came on the heels of the success of the film version of Murder on the Orient Express in 1974. Both books were sealed in a bank vault for over thirty years, and were released for publication by Christie only at the end of her life, when she realised that she could not write any more novels. They were Curtain, in which Poirot is killed, and Sleeping Murder.
Her other well known character, Miss Marple, was introduced in The Murder at the Vicarage in 1930, and was based on Christie's grandmother.ĭuring World War II, Christie wrote two novels intended as the last cases of these two great detectives, Hercule Poirot and Jane Marple, respectively. Agatha Christie's first novel The Mysterious Affair at Styles was published in 1920 and introduced the long-running character detective Hercule Poirot, who appeared in 30 of Christie's novels and 50 short stories.
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