Agatha Christie a long-running character in Christie's works, appearing in 33 novels and 54 short stories. Miss Jane Marple, introduced in the short-story collection "The Thirteen Problems" in 1927, was based on Christie's grandmother and her "Ealing cronies". Both Jane and Gran "always expected the worst of everyone and everything, and were, with almost frightening accuracy, usually proved right." Marple appeared in 12 novels and 20 stories. During the Second World War, Christie wrote two novels, "Curtain" and "Sleeping Murder", intended as the last cases of these two great detectives, Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple. Both books were sealed in a bank
Miss Marple nephew ("A Caribbean Mystery", 1964). She is not herself from the aristocracy or landed gentry, but is quite at home among them and would probably have been happy to describe herself as "genteel"; indeed, a "gentlewoman". Miss Marple may thus be considered a female version of that staple of British detective fiction, the gentleman detective. She demonstrates a remarkably thorough education, including some art courses that involved study of human anatomy through the study of human cadavers. In "They Do It with Mirrors" (1952), it is revealed that Miss Marple grew up in a cathedral close, and that she studied