Miss Marple Morton adapted the novel for the stage, he replaced the character of Caroline with a young girl. This change saddened Christie and she determined to give old maids a voice: Miss Marple was born. Christie may have taken the name from Marple railway station, through which she passed, or from Marple Hall, near her sister Madge's home at Abney Hall. The character of Jane Marple in the first Miss Marple book, "The Murder at the Vicarage", is markedly different from how she appears in later books. This early version of Miss Marple is a gleeful gossip and not an especially
Agatha Christie However, unlike Conan Doyle, Christie resisted the temptation to kill her detective off while he was still popular. She saw herself as an entertainer whose job was to produce what the public liked, and the public liked Poirot. She did marry off Poirot's companion Captain Hastings in an attempt to trim her cast commitments. In contrast, Christie was fond of Miss Marple. However, the Belgian detective's titles outnumber the Marple titles more than two to one. This is largely because Christie wrote numerous Poirot novels early in her career, while "The Murder at the Vicarage" remained the sole Marple novel