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 Miss Marple: The Complete Short Stories May 5, 2008
Excellent as with all of the Miss Marple stories by Christie. I was disappointed a little because I thought I was getting a collection of Marple stories I did'nt already own. In fact, the book begins with the Tuesday Club Murders (which is already on my bookshelf). This was an error on my part because I should have checked the book out in more detail before purchasing. Still, a good collection to buy if you don't already have the stories in separate books. Besides, we Christie fans never tire of rereading about the exploits of her most famous detectives.
 Mis Marple's the best July 29, 2007
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This short story collection is wonderful! Twenty delightful stories featuring Miss Jane Marple solving difficult cases. Miss Marples sharp observations, her spunk, wit, and intelligence shine through in these tales, making clear why Agatha Christie has created one of the greatest female sleuths of all time. If you're a fan of Christie's or Marple's, you can't go wrong with this colleciton.
"Never say to yourself that anyone is above suspicion." June 2, 2007
3 out of 5 found this review helpful
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.
Miss Marple Short Stories November 13, 2006
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Quick response, book in good condition. there was a printing defect with the book, but it is still OK.
Dear Aunt Jane's Shorter Cases. December 31, 2004
38 out of 39 found this review helpful
"Miss Marple insinuated herself so quickly into my life that I hardly noticed her arrival," Agatha Christie wrote in her posthumously-published autobiography (1977) about the elderly lady who, next to Belgian super-sleuth Hercule Poirot, quickly became one of her most beloved characters. Somewhat resembling Christie's own grandmother and her friends, although "far more fussy and spinsterish" and "not in any way a picture" of the author's granny, like her, she had a certain gift for prophecy and, "though a cheerful person, she always expected the worst of everyone and everything, and was, with almost frightening accuracy, usually proved right."
Although Christie herself considered Miss Marple her favorite creation - preferred even over the prim and proper Belgian with the many "little grey cells," of whose exploits she occasionally tired and whom she brought back again and again chiefly because of her audience's undying demand - there are only twelve Miss Marple novels and twenty short stories: while no small feat in any other author's body of work, just over one tenth of the lifetime output of the writer justifiedly dubbed The Queen of Crime.
This compilation unites the twenty short stories revolving around St. Mary Mead's elderly village sleuth, beginning with the canon of originally six and, after an expansion for republication in book form, later thirteen stories which, in addition to the novel "A Murder at the Vicarage" (1930) introduced Miss Marple to the world; a series of unsolved problems told by her guests one Tuesday night, to be followed by six further problems narrated during a similar gathering at the home of village squire Colonel Bantry and his wife Dolly, about a year later. In attendance on those two nights are a number of people who make recurring appearances next to Miss Marple; first and foremost her doting nephew - thriller novelist Raymond West - and retired Scotland Yard Commissioner Sir Henry Clithering, as well as village solicitor Petherick, and of course the Bantrys (who will move center stage, much to their embarrassment, in "A Body in the Library," 1942); furthermore Raymond's new flame, artist Joyce (later reincarnated as his wife Joan), a doctor, a clergyman, and a well-known actress. Later stories also feature appearances of Miss Marple's niece Diana "Bunch" Harmon, married to the vicar of Chipping Cleghorn, a village not unlike St. Mary Mead (see "A Murder Is Announced," 1950), St. Mary Mead's Dr. Haydock, several maids called Gladys, as well as Inspectors Slack and Craddock and Colonel Melchett of Melchester C.I.D. and village Constable Palk; and of course the usual cast of other unique characters, many of whom could just as well figure in one of the elderly lady's "village parallels," those seemingly unimportant events summing up her knowledge of life, on which she unfailingly draws in unmasking even the cleverest killer. Avid Christie readers will also recognize certain other character types, plot snippets, settings and other features here and there; for Dame Agatha was known to draw repeatedly on devices she found to have worked before, and she tended to use her short stories as mini-laboratories for elements later expanded on in novels. Caveat, lector, of premature conclusions, however, for Christie was equally known to throw in a little extra twist in such cases: what is a real clue in one instance may well be a red herring in another and vice versa, and one story's innocent bystander may easily be the next story's murderer.
"The Thirteen Problems" (1932, a/k/a "The Tuesday Club Murders"):
"The Tuesday Night Club:" Sir Henry Clithering opens the evening with the case of a woman's mysterious poisoning by arsenic.
"The Idol House of Astarte:" A man inexplicably dies after a costume party's nightly excursion to a pagan temple.
"Ingots of Gold:" Raymond West tells about a treasure hunt, sunken ships and murder on the Cornish coast.
"The Bloodstained Pavement:" Joyce and the case of a drowned wife in a Cornish watering place called Rathole.
"Motive vs. Opportunity:" Mr. Petherick's tale of a will that mysteriously vanishes from its sealed envelope.
"The Thumb Mark of St. Peter:" Miss Marple's story how she quashed rumors about the sudden death of her niece Mabel's husband.
"The Blue Geranium:" Opening the second round of mysteries, Colonel Bantry's narration about a prophecy involving death and three uncharacteristically blue flowers.
"The Companion:" Two English ladies go on a holiday in Tenerife, but only one returns home alive.
"The Four Suspects:" Sir Henry Clithering's account of the murder of a retired secret agent.
"A Christmas Tragedy:" Having failed to prevent a murder, Miss Marple is all the more eager to unmask the murderer.
"The Herb of Death:" Mrs. Bantry's gifts as a storyteller, a serving of sage and foxglove, and a charming young girl's unexpected death.
"The Affair at the Bungalow:" Double-dealings, charades and mischief on stage and off, just outside of London.
"Death by Drowning:" A village girl "in trouble" finds a desperate solution - or does she?
From "The Regatta Mystery and Other Stories" (1939):
"Miss Marple Tells a Story:" Miss Marple assists Mr. Petherick in the case of a client accused of having murdered his wife.*
From "Three Blind Mice and Other Stories" (1950):
"Strange Jest:" A rich iconoclast's final joke - at the expense of his heirs?*
"Tape-Measure Murder:" Miss Marple's knowledge of village life and human nature (once more) corrects the all-too straightforward path of Inspector Slack's investigation of an elderly lady's murder.*
"The Case of the Caretaker:" Dr. Haydock's story about a rural rascal, a poor little rich girl, an old estate and its grumpy caretaker.*
"The Case of the Perfect Maid:" Domestic service and burglary in a Victorian estate-turned-apartment building.*
From "The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding" (1960):
"Greenshaw's Folly" (republished in "Double Sin," below): A reverse-locked-room mystery at an eccentrically-built country estate.
From "Double Sin and Other Stories" (1961):
"Sanctuary" (first published 1954, a/k/a "The Man on the Chancel Steps"): The last secret of a man found dying on Chipping Cleghorn's church steps.*
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*Republished posthumously in "Miss Marple's Final Cases" (1979).
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Also recommended:
Murder at the Vicarage: A Miss Marple Mystery (Agatha Christie Collection)
Agatha Christie: Five Complete Miss Marple Novels (Avenel Suspense Classics)
Marple Classic Mysteries (Caribbean Mystery/4:50 from Paddington/Moving Finger/Nemesis/At Bertram's Hotel/Murder at Vicarage/Sleeping Murder/They Do It with Mirrors/Mirror Crack'd from Side to Side)
Miss Marple - 3 Feature Length Mysteries (The Body in the Library / A Murder Is Announced / A Pocketful of Rye)
The Mirror Crack'd
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