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
Marple railway station around the hall and Cheadle inspired many settings within her books. Due to living in Devon, Christie often used the railway to travel up to what was then Cheshire, by connecting from the Midland Main Line from London St Pancras onto the Hope Valley Line, and passing through Marple. It is theorised that at some point, a train was delayed there for long enough for the station sign to stick in her mind, to resurface in 1932 at the publication of the first novel featuring the detective Jane Marple. As part of Manchester's Transport Innovation Fund bid in 2008, which