Miss Marple novels written by Agatha Christie

AT BERTRAM'S HOTEL

UK publication: 1965 (Collins) US publication: 1966 (Dodd, Mead)

Raymond West and his wife again decide to do something for Miss Marple, and give her a week's stay at Bertram's Hotel in London, which she had loved as a girl. She is about 75 years old by this point, and the story is slower-paced, giving her woolly thought processes time to be explored.

There are indeed strange goings-on at Bertram's. Murder is not the only crime, but there is a murder in due course, near the end. Elvira Blake is one of Christie's more interesting modern young people, and the police are led by Chief Inspector Davy, assisted by the mysterious Mr Robinson (of Cat Among the Pigeons). The solution is clever but probably impossible for the reader to discover.

THE BODY IN THE LIBRARY

UK publication: 1942 (Collins) US publication: 1942 (Dodd, Mead)

The first Marple novel in twelve years, the action taking place at Colonel and Mrs Bantry's country house in St Mary Mead. Dolly Bantry is awakened by her maid rushing in to tell her that there's a "body in the library", and the usual village regulars are represented in the ensuing excitement: the Rev Leonard Clement, his wife Griselda and their infant child, Dr Haydock, the village busybody Mrs Price Ridley, the former police commissioner and friend of the Bantrys Sir Henry Clithering and the unpleasant Inspector Slack. The victim is a dance hostess at a coastal hotel, so the suspects need not be village residents.

A CARIBBEAN MYSTERY

UK publication: 1964 (Collins) US publication: 1965 (Dodd, Mead)

This is the only occasion when Miss Marple ventures abroad. She has been sent by Raymond West, her nephew, to St Honore in the caribbean on holiday. The characters she meets at the resort include the elderly, crotchety and extremely wealthy Jason Rafiel, who will influence the plot of Nemesis, as well as a pleasant but boring old army major who tells interminable stories of his experiences but mysteriously shuts up just before he is about to show Miss Marple the 'picture of a murderer'. Much of the plot is concerned with concealed relationships.

4.50 FROM PADDINGTON

US title: WHAT MRS. McGILLICUDDY SAW Other titles: MURDER, SHE SAID (in US reprint, Cardinal, 1961) UK publication: 1957 (Collins)US publication: 1957 (Dodd, Mead)

What Mrs McGillicuddy in fact saw, as the American title says, while riding the 4.50 train from Paddington to the west, was a murder being committed in a passing train on the neighbouring track. At first, the only person who believes her is her friend Miss Marple. As Miss Marple's investigation proceeds, the police become involved. The action centers around Rutherford Hall, the home of the Crackenthorpe family. Miss Marple is growing more frail, and has to enlist the help of her grandnephew David, who works for the railways, as well as the adventurous young Lucy Eylesbarrow, who poses as a maid in the Crackenthorpe house and her protege Inspector Dermot Craddock. The story was adapted into a film Murder She Said in 1961.

THE MIRROR CRACK'D FROM SIDE TO SIDE

US title: THE MIRROR CRACK'D UK publication: 1962 (Collins) US publication: 1963 (Dodd, Mead)

Modern times are arriving in St Mary Mead. Dolly Bantry, Miss Marple's good friend, has sold her house, Gossington Lodge and it is bought by Marina Gregg, a famous film star. At a fete held on the grounds, one of the visitors dies from a poisoned drink and it is thought that Miss Gregg is the intended victim. The title of the book which refers to the 'frozen look' Gregg's face comes from Tennyson. Miss Marple's young protege Inspector Craddock investigates, but it is Miss Marple, of course, who solves the crime. St Mary Mead has changed, as English villages were doing, with new shops and housing developments. A lavish but disappointing Hollywood film was made of the story (as "The Mirror Crack'd") in 1980, with Angela Lansbury, Elizabeth Taylor, and Rock Hudson.

THE MOVING FINGER

Other titles: THE CASE OF THE MOVING FINGER (in US reprint, Avon, 1948) UK publication: 1943 (Collins)US publication: 1942 (Dodd, Mead)

A young man who has come to the small market town of Lymstock with his sister, Joanna, to recuperate from an accident. An outbreak of poison-pen letters in the village leads to two deaths, the first apparently suicide but the second definitely murder. The letters accuse various villagers of improbable and illicit sexual acts. The vicar's wife, Maud Dane Calthrop, invites her friend Miss Marple to stay at the vicarage, and she solves the puzzle alongside the local police and citizens.

THE MURDER AT THE VICARAGE

UK publication: 1930 (Collins) US publication: 1930 (Dodd, Mead)

This is the first Miss Marple novel. Set amidst the village life of St Mary Mead, where Miss Marple has always lived, it is narrated by the vicar, the Rev Leonard Clement. An irritating parishioner, Colonel Protheroe, is found dead in the vicar's study. Suspects include the vicar himself, his wife Griselda, and his teenage nephew Dennis, as well as the colonel's wife, daughter, an anthropologist and a mysterious Mrs Lestrange. Miss Marple's neighbour, Dr Haydock, and the novelist nephew Raymond West also reappear.

A MURDER IS ANNOUNCED

UK publication: 1950 (Collins) US publication: 1950 (Dodd, Mead)

This is one of the most entertaining Miss Marple novels, with a well-drawn picture of England's post-war muddle. A newspaper advertisement in the village of Chipping Cleghorn announces that a murder will take place at a specified time and location, and a number of people turn up at Little Paddocks, where Letitia Blacklock lived with a companion, two young relatives and a paying guest. A murder does in fact occur, although not the one expected and Miss Marple, who is staying in a nearby spa for her rheumatism, seems to know something about the murdered man. Her friendship with Sir Henry Clithering allows her access to the case. The solution involves a lot of coincidence and a few far-fetched incidents.

NEMESIS

UK publication: 1971 (Collins) US publication: 1971 (Dodd, Mead)

This is the last Miss Marple novel that Agatha Christie wrote. The wealthy and elderly Jason Rafiel, whom Miss Marple met in A Caribbean Mystery, has died and left her a legacy on condition that she investigate a certain crime. She is not told more than that but is soon invited to join a tour of famous houses of Britain at his expense, and it soon appears that she is investigating a murder as well as a rape that took place in the past. Christie has become more careless in her old age, but the book is still a good read.

A POCKETFUL OF RYE

UK publication: 1953 (Collins) US publication: 1954 (Dodd, Mead)

Another nursery-rhyme story, with murders committed in the order of they appear in Sing a Song of Sixpence. The first victim, the 'king, is Rex Fortescue, a financier, found with rye in his pocket. The second, his wife, was poisoned with cyanide at teatime. The third victim, a parlourmaid, is strangled with a stocking and found with a clothes-peg on her nose, at which point Miss Marple makes the connection to the rhyme, asking Inspector Neele to investigate the question of blackbirds. The action takes place around Yewtree Lodge, Fortescue's house in the suburbs.

SLEEPING MURDER

UK publication: 1976 (Collins) US publication: 1976 (Dodd, Mead)

Like Curtain, Poirot's last case, Sleeping Murder had been written during the Second World War and kept by Christie for posthumous publication as Miss Marple's last case. The book was released ten months after Christie's death in January 1976. Miss Marple survives her last case, and in fact seems younger than she does in Nemesis, her previous novel, but Christie's chronologies need not be taken too seriously. The heroine of the book, Gwenda Reed, is attending a play when a line triggers suppressed memories of a murder in her childhood, which seems to be connected to her new house in Devon. Gwenda's husband, Giles, is a cousin of Raymond West, who enlists Miss Marple to find out what, if anything, actually happened. A very successful story of a 'distant-past' crime investigation.

THEY DO IT WITH MIRRORS

US title: MURDER WITH MIRRORS UK publication: 1952 (Collins)US publication: 1952 (Dodd, Mead

Miss Marple is reminiscing with her old school friend Ruth and finds that she is worried about her sister, Carrie Louise, who is married to an idealist, Lewis Serrocold. He is running a home for delinquent boys in the south of England. Carrie is the widow of Mr Gulbrandsen, a famous millionaire and philanthropist, and it is Gulbrandsen's brother who is murdered while Miss Marple is visiting the Sorrocolds.