Miss Marple: The Complete Short Stories [Paperback]

Agatha Christie (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0425094863 | ISBN-13: 978-0425094860 | Publication Date: November 1, 1986 | Edition: Reprint, 1st as such

A stunningly repackaged omnibus, gathering together every short story featuring one of Agatha Christie's most famous creations: Miss Marple. Described by her friend Dolly Bantry as ' the typical old maid of fiction', Miss Marple has lived almost her entire life in the sleepy hamlet of St Mary Mead. Yet, by observing village life she has gained an unparalleled insight into human nature - and used it to devasting effect. As her friend Sir Henry Clithering, the ex-Commissioner of Scotland Yard has been heard to say: 'She's just the finest detective God ever made.' - and many Agatha Christie fans would agree. Appearing for the first time in The Murder at The Vicarage (1930) her crime-fighting career spanned over forty years when she solved her final case in 1977 in Sleeping Murder. With every tale flawlessly plotted by the Queen of Crime herself, these short stories provide a feast for hardened Agatha Christie addicts as well as those who have grown to love the detective through her many film and television appearances.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Fans of the amiable, omniscient Miss Marple will be delighted by the first publication in one volume of all 20 short stories that Christie centered on the elderly sleuth. Wearing her black lace mittens, Miss Marple sits in her chair, knitting and digesting details of murders of all descriptions (from poisonings to a drowning to a shooting by bow and arrow). She manages, of course, to see through all false identities and bogus alibis, and neatly solves each puzzle, no matter how obscure or far-fetched. The bulk of the stories are gathered from The Tuesday Club murders, chronicling the meetings of a group formed by Miss Marple and a handful of her friends. The members take turns recounting mysteries to which they know the answers, while the others take a stab at cracking the cases. Readers will have fun playing along, but beware: Miss Marple is fierce competition. Foreign rights: Hughes Massie. December 2
Copyright 1985 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Review

'The plots are so good that one marvels ... most of them would have made a full length thriller.' Daily Mirror --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 352 pages
• Publisher: Berkley Trade; Reprint, 1st as such edition (November 1, 1986)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0425094863
• ISBN-13: 978-0425094860
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5.1 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (19 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #494,402 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Agatha Christie was born in 1890 and created the detective Hercule Poirot in her debut novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920). She achieved wide popularity with The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926) and produced a total of eighty novels and short-story collections over six decades.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Superb Collection of Short Stories, July 2, 2001

By 

K. Hill (Windsor, NC USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

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This review is from: Miss Marple: The Complete Short Stories (Paperback)

I love the character of Miss Marple. The way she is constantly underestimated never ceases to amuse. Agatha Christie was up to her best when she wrote these stories. Nothing's predictable except that Miss Marple will solve the crime. My favorites in this collection are from The Tuesday Club Murders. None of the stories in this book are very long but with each one I couldn't wait to get to the end and find out who the murderer was. I've read the book twice yet I still couldn't recall or predict who the murder would be in the majority of the stories. Great book!

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "Never say to yourself that anyone is above suspicion.", June 2, 2007

By 

L. E. Cantrell (Vancouver, British Columbia Canada) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Miss Marple: the Complete Short Stories (Paperback)

The words quoted above appeared in a short story by Agatha Christie called "The Four Suspects." They were not spoken by Miss Marple but by "that well-groomed man of the world, Sir Henry Clithering," retired now and residing in St Mary Mead or nearby, but "until lately Commissioner of Scotland Yard." The words were addressed to Sir Henry's new neighbour, a certain Miss Jane Marple. There is EVERY reason to assume that Miss Marple agreed.

An earlier reviewer quoted a short passage from "An Autobiography" by Christie. I shall quote a little more extensively from the same source: "Miss Marple," wrote Dame Agatha, "insinuated herself so quickly into my life that I hardly noticed her arrival. I wrote a series of six short stories for a magazine, and chose six people whom I thought might meet once a week in a small village and describe some unsolved crime. I started with Miss Jane Marple, the sort of old lady who would have been rather like some of my grandmother's Ealing cronies--old ladies whom I met in so many villages where I had gone to stay as a girl. Miss Marple was not in any way a picture of my grandmother; she was far more fussy and spinsterish than my grandmother ever was. 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...."

Later, she added, "Miss Marple was born a the age of sixty-five to seventy--which, as with Poirot, proved most unfortunate, because she was gong to have to last a long time in my life. If I had had any second sight, I would have provided myself with a precocious schoolboy as my first detective; then he would have grown old with me."

The first sextet of magazine stories were published in the late 1920s but did not achieve the dignity of book publication until 1932, two years after the publication of "Murder at the Vicarage," the first novel to feature Miss Marple.

The 1932 volume contained the first sextet of stories mentioned by Christie in her autobiography, plus a second sextet and one more story to provide a satisfactorily ominous title for the collection, "The Thirteen Problems." (In the US, the book appeared--less happily--as "The Tuesday Club Murders.") Christie wrote seven more short stories for Miss Marple. They all are included in this volume. The later stories are good enough, but Miss Marple had so grown in stature that her true milieu was the full-length mystery novel.

I suggest that special note be taken of the tenth story, "A Christmas Tragedy." This story represents a sea change in Miss Jane Marple. In all prior appearances she had been a mere device, a voice through which the author could resolve her little puzzles. With this story, the fully developed, elderly, tough as nails, knitting Nemesis of the novels emerges.

These twenty stories are competent, if not brilliant. No-one, least of all Agatha Christie, would call them literature. They are amusements, clever puzzles set to dialogue. As such, most of them are splendid. There are a couple of minor misfires, one in which the solution to a coded message is in English when by the logic of the story it should have been in German, another in which Christie chose to emulate the mechanically-oriented stories common in those days among the works of her less-talented contemporaries. A classic Christie work incorporates some deceptively simple example of what might be called mental sleight-of-hand. Stories that depend on gimmicked mechanical implements and the like seem somehow beneath Dame Agatha's dignity.

Reading these stories quickly demonstrates that Agatha Christie was born one of nature's great re-cyclers. Dame Aggie had a strong tendency to ... ahem, quote from herself when a good plot was involved. For those who would put a more positive spin on the simple facts, then it might be said that within these stories may be found seeds that later sprouted into full-length mystery classics such as "A Murder is Announced" and "Murder Under the Sun."

The collection, I was surprised to discover, was dedicated to Leonard and Katherine Woolley. Sir Leonard Woolley was a great archeologist who famously excavated the ancient city of Ur in Sumeria, a land that would one day come to be known as southern Iraq. He became a media superstar when he dug down through the artifact-laden soil of Ur to find a very thick layer almost entirely free of man-made remains, and beneath that yet another layer of artifacts. Woolley attributed the break in the artifact layers to an extensive flood--or as he suggested a bit prematurely and the newspapers shouted loudly to all the world, not a flood but The Flood. When the shouting was at its height, Christie was already a world-famous author and an enthusiastic traveler. She visited the dig at Ur and stayed on for some time to lend a hand. There she met and fell in love with archeologist Max Mallowan, whom she married in the same year that she published "Murder at the Vicarage."

Doubtless, anyone who has slogged this far is wondering why I've wandered so far off-track with all this biographical blather. The reason is simply that I am astonished to see Katherine Woolley's name in the dedication. When Christie arrived, Lady Woolley was very much in residence at her husband's archeological site. She regarded herself as Queen of all she surveyed and she went out of her way to make sure that the upstart mystery novelist knew it. Christie got on with Leonard Woolley, but she simply could not abide his wife. In one of her novels, she made a perfectly obvious caricature of Lady Woolley into the murderess. When she transformed the book into a stage play, Christie slyly converted her novel's villainess into her play's comic relief.

This collection of the twenty Marple short stories are, as I've said, not literature themselves, nor even necessarily vintage Christie. Nevertheless, they are clever, entertaining and an invaluable memento of one of the great literary characters of the Twentieth Century.

Five stars for Agatha, for Jane and for St Mary Mead.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Harper and Collins, August 20, 2011

By 

Kim - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Miss Marple: The Complete Short Stories (Miss Marple Mysteries) (Paperback)

The only criticism I have of this book, as it is otherwise completely entertaining, is that there are pages missing. Not that it skips from page 156 to 164 but that there are probably two pages of story line missing from 156 to 157. I'm just issuing this as a warning to anyone who purchases this edition. I will contact Harper and Collins and let them know about this as well.