Miss Marple

[mellicious]

I mentioned last week that I was reading Miss Marple. And from what I put together I think that the stories Agatha Christie first wrote about Miss M were first published in magazines ("The Royal Magazine" was where the first one was published, in 1927). Later on the first set of stories were apparently published as The Thirteen Problems, but that's no longer available on its own, that I could find. They are in Miss Marple: the complete short stories, which does put them under the header of "The Thirteen Problems" in the table of contents. (Actually, I can see the point of grouping them all in one book, because the original 13 are quite short; as a book they would seem kind of lacking.)

Anyway, so I read the original 13 stories, and then I went back and started over with the novels, and it did make a difference in how I perceived things. Not all the characters from the novels are in the stories, of course, but you get a feel for the English-village background and so forth. I thought it helped - I grew up in a small town but not anything like these tiny villages Christie describes.

I had already read the first three novels, but now I've re-read the first one and I'm going to re-read the other two before I go on to the rest. (Also, I keep waiting for Amazon to put her books on sale, but I guess they still sell well because they're still mostly priced pretty high.* She is apparently the best-selling novelist of all time - said to only be outsold by Shakespeare and the Bible!)

(I wrote down the paragraph about the publication of the short stories because I wanted to remember it myself, but I thought some of y'all might well be interested too!)


*They do turn up on those daily sale e-mails Amazon sends out from time to time, though. Oh, also watch out for another anthology which is seemingly marketed as by Christie but is actually stories in Christie style by other authors - fine if you know what you're getting, but it didn't seem super-clear to me at first, looking at the cover info! (I just looked and the one I'm talking about is called Marple : 12 New Mysteries, which would be fine if it didn't have "Agatha Christie" in huge letters on the cover. That seems deceptive to me.)