Miss Marple

Dear Miss Marple,

We love how you use the wisdom of your garden, a wonderful metaphor for growth and discovery, to help solve tangled, often multigenerational village mysteries.

You once described a puzzle of deception in At Bertram’s Hotel: “It is like when you get ground elder really badly in a border. There’s nothing else you can do about it—except dig the whole thing up.”

And dig the whole thing up is what you often do, in your polite but probing procedures (which usually seem personal rather than formal—or is this part of your tidy effectiveness, to hide behind your knitting or...

Dear Miss Marple:

You have always said that your life in the village of St. Mary Mead has given you examples of nearly every type of person—clues that help you solve new cases, by applying the lessons learned.

And what a lot of shady characters and convoluted situations you have personally come upon in your sleuthing career!

“There is a great deal of wickedness in village life. I hope you dear young people will never realize how very wicked the world is.” —Miss Jane Marple in “The Blood-Stained Pavement.”

How we admire your steel-trap-like mind that picks up even the slightest clues...