The 1960s saw four MGM film adaptations starring friend of the family Margaret Rutherford, although many of these were only loosely based on Agatha Christie’s novels (and two originally involved Poirot). Many great actors have taken on the role of Marple, the first being Gracie Fields in a (now lost) US TV adaptation of A Murder is Announced in 1956. Marple also employs a selection of maids, all young women from the nearby orphanage, training them in her Victorian way. Her nephew, the well-known author Raymond West and his wife Joan (initially Joyce) crop up most commonly in her stories. Miss Marple never married and her closest living relatives are her nephews and nieces. She certainly changes with the times, even down to wearing plimsolls in 1964’s A Caribbean Mystery. The Miss Marple of The Thirteen Problems is decidedly more shrewish and Victorian than the later character, who is often more forgiving. But one thing she did have in common with her – though a cheerful person, she always expected the worst of everyone and everything, and was, with almost frightening accuracy, usually proved right.' Mellowing with appearances (if not with age) Miss Marple graced twelve novels and twenty short stories during her career as an amateur detective, never paid and not always thanked. While Agatha Christie acknowledged that her grandmother had been a huge influence on the character, she writes that Miss Marple was 'far more fussy and spinsterish than my grandmother ever was. Christie never expected Miss Marple to rival Poirot in the public’s affections but since the publication of The Murder at the Vicarage in 1930, Marple's first full length novel, readers were hooked. It was first published in the December 1927 issue of Royal Magazine. Miss Marple first came into being in 1927 in The Tuesday Night Club, a short story pulled together into the collection The Thirteen Problems.

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