Miss Marple at an Italian finishing school with Americans Ruth Van Rydock and Caroline "Carrie" Louise Serrocold. While Miss Marple is described as 'an old lady' in many of the stories, her age is mentioned in "At Bertram's Hotel", where it is said she visited the hotel when she was fourteen and almost sixty years have passed since then. Excluding "Sleeping Murder", 41 years passed between the first and last-written novels, and many characters grow and age. An example would be the Vicar's nephew: in "The Murder at the Vicarage", the Reverend Clement's nephew Dennis is a teenager; in "The Mirror Crack'd
Which Lie Did I Tell? Some of these snippets offer an insight into Goldman's background that was not in the first book—such as his relationship with his parents, his university life and time in the military—the book thereby shading into autobiography. The chapters on "The Princess Bride", "Misery", "Maverick" and "The Ghost and the Darkness" originally appeared in his books "Four Screenplays" and "Five Screenplays" and in the published shooting script for "The Ghost and the Darkness". Michael Sragow describes "Which Lie Did I Tell? (More Adventures in the Screen Trade)": "In addition to brief descriptions of topics like "spitballing" (brainstorming story notions) and expansions