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
The Murder at the Vicarage of Miss Weatherby, the changing of Mrs. Price-Ridley's first name from "Martha" to "Marjorie", the renaming of Bill Archer to Frank Tarrent and the addition of a plotline in which the Colonel stole 10,000 francs from the French Resistance, which led to the death of an agent. Two major departures from the book are the portrayal of Miss Marple as Anne's close friend and the addition of a series of flashbacks to December 1915, where a younger Miss Marple was engaged in a forbidden love affair with a married soldier. In both versions, the vicar's role is reduced and he