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Marple, Jane. Jane Marple was created by Agatha Christie (Superintendent Battle, Tommy & Tuppence Beresford, Hercule Poirot, Parker Pyne, Harley Quin, Colonel Race, Solving Six) and appeared in twenty-six stories and serials and fifteen novels and short story collections from 1927 to 1976, beginning with “The Tuesday Night Club” (The Royal Magazine, Dec. 1927).

Jane Marple is a Spinster Detective. She begins as a member of the Solving Six before branching out on her own. She is an elderly spinster, modest and more than a little retiring. She is not, however, mild or particularly meek. She is simply well-mannered. Her mind is quite clear, incisive, and well-disciplined, and she is, in the finest traditions of amateur detectives, able to see what others cannot or do not and make quick, lengthy, and accurate deductions based on what she sees or knows. Marple lives in the small English village of St. Mary Mead, from which she has observed human nature for years and drawn the proper conclusions about it. She is tall and thin, with long white hair and soft blue eyes; she usually wears black dresses. Her hobby is knitting.

* I'm including the Jane Marple stories and novels in the Best of the Encyclopedia category because they are historically important and because she's an archetype. There were female detectives before Jane Marple--even a few Spinster Detectives. But Agatha Christie, via the Maple stories and novels, essentially forced the publishing industry to accept female detectives and Spinster Detectives as a good and commercially viable element of detective fiction, which was a very disruptive change to what had been a male-dominated genre. Marple became the archetypal old woman detective and archetypal Spinster Detective thanks to Christie's runaway popularity, and although the image of a Spinster Detective currently in most people's minds is Angela Lansbury's Jessica Fletcher from Murder, She Wrote, Miss Marple remains the archetype. 

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