Miss Marple

Presented for the first time in one volume are all twenty of the short stories featuring Miss Jane Marple, that delightful spinster whose innocent blue eyes belie her shrewd insights. Here, in her pretty Victorian home, her knitting needles clicking softly in the background, Agatha Christie's famous amateur sleuth solves twenty crimes in her mild, quiet manner, basing her solutions on past experiences and an insistence that human nature is the same everywhere. It was, of course, the small village of St. Mary Mead that served as Miss Marple's training ground in the finer points of criminal behavior, and this, according to the former commissioner of Scotland Yard, Sir Henry Clithering, was clearly a matter of "natural genius cultivated in a suitable soil." While others are mulling over seemingly unfathomable situations, Miss Marple uses her principles to sort out facts and "go straight to the truth like a homing pigeon." These stories are masterpieces of detection and each one has just the added ingenious twist that only Agatha Christie can give.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Fiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.