Miss Jane Marple is an elderly woman who lives in the little English village of St. Mary Mead. She looks like an ordinary old lady, dressed neatly in tweed and is frequently seen knitting or pulling weeds in her garden. Miss Marple sometimes comes across as confused or "fluffy", but when it comes to solving mysteries, she has a sharp logical mind. In the detective story tradition, she often embarrasses the local "professional" police by solving mysteries that have them stumped.
The name Miss Marple was derived from the name of the railway station in Marple, on the Manchester to Sheffield Hope Valley line, at which Agatha Christie was once delayed long enough to have actually noticed the sign.
The character of Jane Marple in the first Miss Marple book, The Murder at the Vicarage, is markedly different from how she would appear in later books. This early version of Miss Marple is a gleeful gossip and not an especially nice woman. In later books she becomes more modern and a kinder person.
Miss Marple never married and has no close living relatives. Vicarage introduced Miss Marple's nephew, the "well-known author" Raymond West. His wife Joan (initially called Joyce), a modern artist, was introduced in 1933 in The Thirteen Problems. Raymond tends to be overconfident in himself and underestimates Miss Marple's mental powers. In her later years, Miss Marple has a live-in companion named Cherry Baker.
Despite never having been married, The Murder at the Vicarage sheds light on a young Miss Marple. She reveals that she once loved a married man who wanted to leave his wife for her. He was called to World War I and Miss Marple made him promise not to have a divorce. He never came back from the war but was killed there and Miss Marple never married.
Miss Marple is able to solve difficult crimes not only because of her shrewd intelligence, but because St. Mary Mead, over her lifetime, has given her seemingly infinite examples of the negative side of human nature. No crime can arise without reminding Miss Marple of some parallel incident in the history of her time. Miss Marple's acquaintances are sometimes bored by her frequent analogies to people and events from St. Mary Mead, but these analogies often lead Miss Marple to a deeper realization about the true nature of a crime.
Miss Marple also had a remarkably thorough education, including some art courses that involved study of human anatomy through the study of human cadavers. Although she looks like a sweet, frail old woman, Miss Marple is not afraid of dead bodies and is not easily intimidated. She also has a remarkable ability to latch onto a casual comment and connect it to the case at hand.
This education, history, and experience are hinted at in the Margaret Rutherford films, in which Miss Marple mentions her awards at marksmanship and fencing (although these hints are played for comedic value).
Christie wrote a concluding novel to her Marple series, Sleeping Murder, in 1940. She locked it away in a bank vault so it would be safe if she was killed in The Blitz. The novel was not published until shortly after Christie's death in 1976, some thirty-six years after it was originally written. Sleeping Murder created some discrepancies in the timeline of the series, as characters who were killed off by Christie in previously published novels reappeared alive.
