Agatha Christie's Marple

A new investigation from Dr Mark Aldridge, exploring a lifetime of Agatha Christie’s Miss Jane Marple.Winner of the 2025 H.R.F Keating Award for the best 2024 biography or critical book related to crime fiction.

In Agatha Christie’s Marple: Expert on Wickedness,‘Agathologist’ Dr Mark Aldridge looks at nearly a century of St Mary Mead’s most famous resident and uses his own detective skills to uncover new information about Miss Jane Marple’s appearances on page, stage, screen and beyond.

Drawing on a range of material, some of which is newly discovered and previously unpublished, this book explores everything about Miss Marple, from her origins in a series of short stories penned by Christie, to the recent bestselling HarperCollins collection Marple: Twelve New Stories.

This accessible, entertaining and illustrated guide to the world of Miss Marple pieces together the evidence in order to tell you everything you need to know about the world’s favourite female detective.

Author Biography

Mark Aldridge is a senior lecturer and film historian at Solent University, Southampton. He previously wrote the definitive book about Agatha Christie’s book adaptations on film and television, Agatha Christie on Screen, published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2016.

Agatha Christie was born in Torquay in 1890 and became, quite simply, the best-selling novelist in history. Her first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, written towards the end of the First World War, introduced us to Hercule Poirot, who was to become the most popular detective in crime fiction since Sherlock Holmes. She is known throughout the world as the Queen of Crime. Her books have sold over a billion copies in the English language and another billion in over 100 foreign countries. She is the author of 80 crime novels and short story collections, 19 plays, and six novels under the name of Mary Westmacott. Lucy Foley studied English Literature at Durham and UCL universities and worked for several years as a fiction editor in the publishing industry, before leaving to write full-time. Lucy’s debut thriller, The Hunting Party, was an instant Sunday Times and Irish Times bestseller, and was inspired by a particularly remote spot in Scotland that fired her imagination. Lucy is also the author of three historical novels, which have been translated into sixteen languages. Her journalism has appeared in ES Magazine, Sunday Times Style, Grazia and more.