Agatha Christie and the curious truth about Miss Marple

If we are to believe Agatha Christie, then the author was not at all like her creation Miss Marple, the spinster sleuth of St Mary Mead: ‘I never can see why anybody thinks that I resemble Miss Marple in any way,’ she once complained. Instead, Christie – who was born 134 years ago this week – felt that she was much more like her recurring character Ariadne Oliver, an apple-munching writer of crime fiction who despaired of making her most famous detective a Finn (Christie’s own Hercule Poirot was proudly Belgian), and whose complaints often mirrored those in Christie’s own life, including problems with taxation and disagreements over adaptations of her work. But was Christie right in her assertion?

The most convincing evidence for Christie’s claim is a simple matter of age. Miss Marple first appeared at the end of 1927, when Christie was just 37 years old, and so clearly some obvious points of comparison fail here, with Miss Marple at least three decades older than her creator.