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
Miss Marple (TV series) stories including "The Secret Adversary" and in the subsequent series "Agatha Christie's Partners in Crime". With the success of that series, the BBC received approval to produce the stories of one of Christie's most famous detectives. At the time the BBC was granted the screen rights to all 12 Marple novels, the rights to three already co-existed. "The Mirror Crack'd From Side to Side" had already been filmed and theatrically released in 1980 with Angela Lansbury in the role, and the same production company was in the process of filming "A Caribbean Mystery" and "They Do It With Mirrors" with