Of note: Nemesis is the last Jane Marple mystery that Agatha Christie wrote—though not the last Marple published.

• Best Sellers: ‘The old charm is still there and a good deal of the old magic in plotting, too.’
• Times Literary Supplement: ‘Miss Marple is an old lady now, knowing that a scent for evil is still, in the evening of her days, her peculiar gift.’

13. Sleeping Murder (1976)

Soon after Gwenda Reed moves into her new home, odd things start to happen. Despite her best efforts to modernise the house, she only succeeds in dredging up its past. Worse, she feels an irrational sense of terror every time she climbs the stairs…In fear, Gwenda turns to Jane Marple to exorcise her ghosts. Between them, they are to solve a ‘perfect’ crime committed many years before…

Of note: Agatha Christie wrote Sleeping Murder during World War II and had it placed in a bank vault for over thirty years.

• Chicago Tribune: ‘Agatha Christie saved the best for last.’
• Sunday Express: ‘A puzzle that is tortuous, surprising, and…satisfying.’

14. Miss Marple’s Final Cases (1979)

Despite the title, the stories collected here recount cases from the middle of Miss. Marple’s career. They are: ‘Sanctuary’; ‘Strange Jest’; ‘Tape-Measure Murder’; ‘The Case of the Caretaker’; ‘The Case of the Perfect Maid’; ‘Miss Marple Tells a Story’; ‘The Dressmaker’s Doll’; ‘In a Glass Darkly’; ‘Greenshaw’s Folly.’

• The Republican (Springfield, Massachusetts): ‘When it all becomes clear as day, the reader can only say, “Now why didn’t I think of that?” But he never does. Mrs Christie at her best.’

Charles Osborne on The Thirteen Problems

Alternative Title: The Tuesday Club Murders

Miss Marple (1932)

Having successfully introduced her amateur detective, Miss Jane Marple, in The Murder at the Vicarage (1930), Agatha Christie wrote for a magazine a series of six short stories featuring Miss Marple. In the first story, ‘The Tuesday Night Club’, the old lady is entertaining a group of friends at her house in the village of St Mary Mead. Her guests are her nephew Raymond West, the novelist, and his fiancé, an artist named Joyce Lemprière; Dr Pender, the elderly clergyman of the parish (what, one wonders, has happened to the Rev. Leonard Clement, the vicar in The Murder at the Vicarage?); Mr Petherick, a local solicitor; and a visitor to St Mary Mead, Sir Henry Clithering, who is a retired Commissioner of Scotland Yard.

The talk turns to crime, and Joyce Lemprière suggests that they form a club, to meet every Tuesday evening. Each week, a different member of the group will propound a problem, some mystery or other of which they have personal knowledge, which the others will be invited to solve. In the first story, Sir Henry is invited to start the ball rolling. Of course, Miss Marple is the one to arrive at the correct solution every time, not because she possesses any brilliant deductive powers but because, as she puts it, ‘human nature is much the same everywhere, and, of course, one has opportunities of observing it at closer quarters in a village’.