When Agatha Christie created the amateur sleuth Miss Marple, a character inspired by her grandmother and her circle of friends, she said her intention was “to give old maids a voice”. Starting with the short story The Tuesday Night Club in 1927 and concluding with the posthumously published Sleeping Murder in 1976, the doughty detective from St Mary Mead would feature in 12 of Christie’s novels and 20 short stories.
In Marple: Twelve New Stories, a dozen fiction writers, including Val McDermid, Ruth Ware, Lucy Foley, Dreda Say Mitchell, Jean Kwok and Elly Griffiths, come up with new puzzles for Miss Marple to solve. Contributors were given strict criteria: they had to adhere to Christie’s period setting and not mess with the protagonist’s original backstory.
