A new Miss Marple case, fifty years on, sends her to the mountains
An unnamed author, writing in the Guardian, describes being commissioned to produce the first full-length Miss Marple novel since Agatha Christie's death — and choosing to send the elderly sleuth to the Alps.
According to the Guardian, an author who has not been named in the piece itself has written the first full-length Miss Marple novel since Sleeping Murder, the book Agatha Christie completed shortly before her death and which was published posthumously fifty years ago this October. The author describes being approached with the commission and thinking immediately of a grandmother who, in hindsight, seemed rather Marple-ish herself: a keen knitter and gardener, sharp-minded, perceptive about people, kind but with a steelier edge when needed.
Christie introduced Jane Marple in a 1927 Christmas magazine story called The Tuesday Night Club, and gave her a book-length debut in 1930 with The Murder at the Vicarage. Of Christie's 66 detective novels, Marple appears in 12, plus 20 of her 160 short stories — a smaller body of work than Hercule Poirot's, though the character rivalled him in readers' affections. Christie's books have sold more than a billion copies in English and a further billion in translation, the Guardian notes.
Until now, no one had been asked to continue Marple's story the way Sophie Hannah was commissioned by the Christie family in 2013 to write new Poirot novels. The new book, according to the author's own account, takes Miss Marple away from St Mary Mead and into the Alps — the first time in decades that Christie's amateur detective has been handed a fresh case at all.
No title, publisher or publication date for the new novel is given in the material available.
Sources
This article was written from these reports.
