St. Mary Mead St. Mary Mead St. Mary Mead was the fictional village created by popular crime fiction author Dame Agatha Christie. The quaint, sleepy village was home to the renowned detective spinster Miss Marple. However, Christie first described a village of that name prior to Marple's introduction, in the 1928 Hercule Poirot novel "The Mystery of the Blue Train". In that novel, St. Mary Mead is home to the book's protagonist Katherine Grey. The village was first mentioned in a Miss Marple book in 1930, when it was the setting for the first Marple novel, "The Murder at the Vicarage". Miss Marple's
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