Presented for the first time in one
volume are all twenty of the short
stories featuring Miss Jane Marple,
that delightful spinster whose innocent
blue eyes belie her shrewd insights.
Here, in her pretty Victorian home, her
knitting needles clicking softly in the
background, Agatha Christie's famous
amateur sleuth solves twenty crimes in
her mild, quiet manner, basing her
solutions on past experiences and an
insistence that human nature is the
same everywhere.
It was, of course, the small village of
St. Mary Mead that served as Miss
Marple's training ground in the finer
points of criminal behavior, and this,
according to the former commissioner
of Scotland Yard, Sir Henry Clithering, was clearly a matter of "natural genius
cultivated in a suitable soil." While
others are mulling over seemingly
unfathomable situations, Miss Marple
uses her principles to sort out facts and
"go straight to the truth like a homing
pigeon."