It's 75 years since the first Miss Marple novel was published. Anna Carey looks at the legacy of the mild-mannered spinster who flummoxed everyone with her brilliant deductions.
What makes a great detective? A piercing gaze, a commanding presence, the ability to make suspected murderers quail? To many mystery lovers, the greatest detective is a small, fluttery old woman with large, innocent eyes and a habit of waffling on about her relatives. For, as her many fans know, Miss Jane Marple's fluffy demeanour hides a sharp eye and a mind like a steel trap. As her local vicar says, "there is no detective in England equal to a spinster lady of uncertain age with plenty of time on her hands."
This summer sees the 75th anniversary of the first Miss Marple novel, The Murder at the Vicarage, and to celebrate Harper Collins is reissuing the Marple books with their original dustjackets. But the little old lady from Saint Mary Mead had previously appeared in a short story, which appeared in book form several years later as The Thirteen Problems.
"Miss Marple insinuated herself so quietly into my life that I hardly noticed her arrival," wrote Agatha Christie in her autobiography. "I wrote a series of six stories for a magazine and chose six people whom I thought might meet once a week in a small village and describe some unsolved crime. I started with Miss Jane Marple, the sort of old lady who would have been rather like some of my grandmother's Ealing cronies - old ladies whom I have met in so many villages where I have gone to stay as a girl."
Presumably those villages were not as dangerous as the fictional Saint Mary Mead, a hamlet which was the site of so many mysterious deaths it's a wonder its residents didn't spend their lives in a constant state of nervous terror, wondering if they would be next.
Miss Marple is still the best-known woman detective. But she wasn't the first female crime solver in fiction. In 1861 WS Hayward created the first English female detective, Mrs Paschal. She was the heroine of the unimaginatively titled The Revelations of a Lady Detective, and very dashing she was too, taking off her crinoline when it impeded her movements. She was followed in 1864 by a less adventurous - and nameless - female sleuth, in the even more unimaginatively titled The Female Detective by Andrew Forester.
In 1871, however, Wilkie Collins turned his sensational skills to the task of creating a more interesting detective; in The Law and the Lady, Valeria Woodville embarks on a quest to prove that her secretive new husband didn't kill his first wife.
Miss Marple wasn't even the first fictional elderly spinster to turn her hand to detection, and it's likely that Christie was inspired by some of these earlier spinster sleuths. As a girl, Christie had read and enjoyed the stories of American writer Anna Katharine Green, whose That Affair Next Door (1878) introduced amateur detective Miss Amelia Butterworth, a nosy old lady who finds herself assisting a New York police detective Ebenezer Gryce in a murder case. Miss Butterworth went on to appear in several more novels.
And in the 1927 novel Strong Poison, just a few years before Miss Marple's debut, Dorothy L Sayers had created Miss Katharine Climpson, an elderly woman who manages a typing bureau owned by the debonair sleuth Lord Peter Wimsey. The firm is, of course, merely a front, and the typists are all involved in assisting Lord Peter's crime solving. In Strong Poison, Miss Climpson uses her unthreatening, mild appearance and manner to successfully befriend a household which may be involved in a nasty murder.
Christie may have drawn on some of these earlier sleuths in the creation of Miss Marple, but she also drew inspiration from her own family. Miss Marple was based partly on Christie's grandmother, who, like the fictional heroine she inspired, always thought the worst of people - and, as Christie noted, was usually proved right.
Christie's mother Clara may also have been an inspiration. She was such a perceptive woman that Christie's sister Madge once said, "anything I don't want mother to know, I don't even think of, if she's in the room".
For many fans, the BBC's Joan Hickson was the definitive Marple. But last year Miss Marple returned to the screen, with mixed results. The production design of the glossy ITV series - named, simply, Marple - was impeccable, the guest stars (including Joanna Lumley and Jack Davenport) were excellent, but Miss Marple was, well, not Miss Marple. Geraldine McEwan's performance seemed to miss the entire point of the character - she was sharp and beady-eyed and positively roguish. For readers, the satisfying thing about Miss Marple is that no one - including the police - takes her seriously because of her apparent fluffiness, and then she flummoxes them all with her brilliant deductions. McEwan's shrewd, impish Marple was all too obviously capable of not only solving the crime but intimidating the suspects as well. She did wear rather nice hats, though.
Miss Marple wasn't the only famous female crime solver to make her debut in 1930. Nancy Drew was the creation of Edward Stratemeyer, the American publisher who also created crime-solving siblings the Hardy Boys. The early books were written by a young woman called Mildred Wirt, although all bore the name of the non-existent Carolyn Keene. Nancy was a thoroughly modern young woman - independent, fearless, and innovative. She set the tone for every sassy young heroine from Charlie's Angels to Buffy.
And yet, Nancy's popularity has diminished. Although publishers Simon and Schuster recently launched a new series, Nancy Drew: Girl Detective, Nancy is no longer an iconic figure. This may be because these days, young women have a much greater choice of adventurous young heroines, most of which are much more complex interesting than the undoubtedly heroic but somewhat boring Nancy.
Miss Marple, however, remains unbeaten. Although she has definitely inspired other writers - Elizabeth Peters' much-loved crime-solving Edwardian archaeologist Amelia Peabody has been described as a "cross between Miss Marple and Indiana Jones" - elderly female sleuths are still few and far between. No one would claim that Christie was a great writer, but when it came to creating perfectly formed whodunits, nobody did it better.
As Nancy Drew's mysteries tended to involve someone pretending to be a ghost to scare ranchers away from a gold mine, it's not really surprising that she has faded away, while Christie's intricate puzzles are all still in print and enormously popular - not only on the page, but on the small screen as well.
The creators of iconic fictional characters often grow tired of their famous creations. And when they do, the best way to avoid public demand for more is to kill those creations off. Arthur Conan Doyle pushed Sherlock Holmes into the Reichenbach Falls, Colin Dexter killed Inspector Morse, and Christie herself eventually killed off Hercule Poirot, admitting that she found the Belgian detective and his little grey cells "insufferable". But she could never bring herself to get rid of Miss Marple. And nor, it appears, can her fans.
Modern female crime fighters
* Kay Scarpetta Patricia Cornwell's medical examiner was one of the first crime fiction heroines who was neither an amateur sleuth nor a police officer.
* Jane Tennison Helen Mirren brought the tough-talking but hugely sympathetic detective superindendent vividly to life in the hugely popular crime drama Prime Suspect.
* Stephanie Plum Janet Evanovich's hamster-owning bounty-hunter from New Jersey is an unlikely heroine, but her amusingly thrilling adventures have made Evanovich one of the world's most popular crime authors.
* Veronica Mars The eponymous heroine of one of American television's biggest cult hits, teenager Veronica Mars is Nancy Drew with a personality and a stun gun. Over the show's first series, she attempted to solve the mystery of her best friend's murder, while working part time for her dad's private eye business.
