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I have something to admit. When I first started reading Agatha Christie mysteries as a teen, I didn’t like Miss Marple. It wasn’t surprising, perhaps. I was young and thought she was slow and nosy and I just couldn’t relate to her quiet village life.

What a difference a few decades make.

I now own each and every Miss Marple tale, including all the short stories. (Agatha Christie wrote 12 novels and 20 short stories featuring Miss Marple.) As I grew older, I began to appreciate her quiet cunning, her keen wits, her acute ability to observe events. And I grew to love her sly humor and the occasionally caustic tone beneath her ladylike comments.

I have often wondered how I missed the sharp woman behind the old lady façade. She out-thinks everyone around her and is not above giving them (especially her nephew Raymond) the occasional sharp look and pointed observation.

I discovered that her dithery, old lady demeanor is merely a disguise. She uses it to fool criminals, disarm the suspicions of detectives, and generally make everyone believe she is harmless. But beware. Once Miss Marple is riled, the charming old lady cover falls away. As she told one startled older man (whose hotel room she burst into in the middle of the night to tell him to get up and help her prevent a murder) “I am nemesis.”

Nemesis! The definition is “one who inflicts retribution or vengeance.” Not exactly a description of a fluffy little old lady from a small English village. But it suits Miss Marple.

If anybody had been there to observe the gentle-looking elderly lady who stood meditatively on the loggia outside her bungalow, they would have thought she had nothing more on her mind than deliberation on how to arrange her time that day…. But the gentle old lady was deliberating quite other matters. She was in a militant mood.

From A Caribbean Mystery by Agatha Christie

Miss Marple is pure Victorian. She walks with a very erect posture and lawbreakers cut no ice with her. As she once proclaimed to a group of guests at her home, “Sanders was hanged, and a good job too. I have never regretted my part in bringing that man to justice. I’ve no patience with modern humanitarian scruples about capital punishment.” Militant, indeed.

The genius of Miss Marple is that she thinks the worst of everyone. Living in a village has provided her with the opportunity of observing human life in a more personal way than any one living in a town or city could ever experience and she is definitely not a believer in the inherent goodness of human nature:

Edward turned to Miss Marple. “It’s like this, you see. As Uncle Mathew grew older, he got more and more suspicious. He didn’t trust anybody.”

“Very wise of him,” said Miss Marple. “The depravity of human nature is unbelievable.”

From Miss Marple: The Short Stories by Agatha Christie

She knows that people are not as unique as they think they are and she always has a village parallel that she can draw on to predict or explain the behavior of those around her. Nothing shocks her, nothing surprises her. She has seen it all. Miss Marple freely admits that she has a mind “like a sink.” But, as she often points out, sinks are very useful things.

So give Miss Marple a chance. I promise, she’ll grow on you.

For those who love shows, many different actors have played Miss Marple over the years, both on television and in the movies Click here to see the many adaptations.