Marple: 12 New Stories

It takes a brave soul to write in the footsteps of Agatha Christie and they must be even bolder to take on such a beloved figure as Miss Jane Marple. But, as the Polish proverb says, where the devil can’t go he’ll send a woman, and 12 female crime writers have taken up the challenge to each write a short story featuring St Mary Mead’s finest.

In Evil in Small Places by Lucy Foley, Miss Marple is visiting Meon Maltravers when a new French choirmistress with a taste for blackmail falls victim to a murderer. Val McDermid’s The Second Murder at the Vicarage has the Reverend Leonard Clement finding another body in the iconic location, this time that of his erstwhile maid, Mary. It takes Miss Marple to find the link to Mary’s lover, Archer, and solve the killings.

Miss Marple enjoys herself tremendously in New York in Miss Marple Takes Manhattan by Alyssa Cole, where the redoubtable spinster unravels the skullduggery taking place at a theatre adaptation of one of her nephew Raymond’s novels. In The Unravelling by Natalie Haynes, Miss Marple sorts through a sad tale of the fallout from men returning from war.

Miss Marple’s Christmas by Ruth Ware sees our sleuth foil a dastardly plot concerning a pearl necklace at Christmas with the Bantrys, together with a nod to Dorothy L Sayers and a line from one of the TV adaptations. Naomi Alderman’s The Open Mind tells a tale of academic obsession at an Oxford college.

In The Jade Empress by Jean Kwok, Miss Marple solves a murder on a cruise ship to Hong Kong with shades of A Caribbean Mystery in the set-up. Dreda Say Mitchell’s A Deadly Wedding Day finds Miss Marple teaming up with her Caribbean equivalent to solve a death at an aristocratic wedding in England. Murder at the Villa Rosa by Elly Griffiths sets up a crime writer at an Italian hotel filled with people who might be characters from a crime novel, including Miss Marple, naturally.

When an American patriarch suspects one of his children is trying to murder him in The Murdering Sort by Karen M McManus, Miss Marple is also present. Unfortunately, his elaborate game to smoke them out turns deadly. In The Mystery of the Acid Soil by Kate Mosse, a chance meeting on a train puts Miss Marple on the case of village murder and the disappearance of a young woman. Leigh Bardugo also involves Dolly Bantry in The Disappearance where Miss Marple is summoned back from London to solve the disappearance of a young man staying at Gossington Hall.

In any book such as this, there are inevitably variations in quality and viewpoint. I think only Val McDermid attempts to recreate Christie’s writing style and she does it very successfully. Lucy Foley sets up a spooky atmosphere with her village mummers and of the stories that have Miss Marple out of her usual element, I think Miss Marple Takes Manhattan is the most fun. The Jade Empress was entertaining, but my credulity was stretched too far by the concept of Miss Marple joining in with Tai Chi. All in all, this is an entertaining collection of extended universe Miss Marple stories and fans of the original are likely to enjoy the output of newer crime writers playing in the Marple sandbox.