Miss Marple books by Agatha Christie
I have to say, people certainly aren’t kidding when they say that the Miss Marple adaptations get rewritten a lot. But then, I’m not sure how to avoid that when your title character is usually a supporting character. (Obviously, some things got changed more than others, especially in the more recent versions.)
The character of Miss Marple, the “old biddy” sitting in the corner who no one takes seriously but who is actually a brilliant detective who uses her observational skills and knowledge of human nature to solve crimes, is actually only the main character in couple of her books. In most books, she plays a supporting role, and has relatively few scenes in a couple, and the POV characters are often the person she eventually helps, and some books have multiple POV characters. As such, I think the success of individual books depends a lot on how much you like that book’s POV character. While I don’t know if Christie ever actually intended for Miss Marple to be a serial character, I actually think this works interestingly in prose, especially as Miss Marple is frequently isolated from the actual action, and often solves crimes based purely on how events have been related to her (this is more evident in the short stories than in the novels, I think). I remember a Poirot episode where they made a big deal of Poirot being able to do this once, and have to laugh at that now. That said, while it’s interesting in prose form, it’s not something I think would work well on screen, where Miss Marple would likely come across as a bit of a deus ex machina. (Though, that’s basically what she is in the novel for The Moving Finger, where she doesn’t appear until about ¾ through, when the main character is getting absolutely nowhere with anything.) The adaptations, though, also portray her as considerably more worldly than the books, which…doesn’t make her skills less impressive, necessarily, but does remove the “wow, you figured out the killer’s 10 layer alibi while knitting a scarf because of how your neighbor’s gardener was lazy and didn’t weed well?” effect.
As mysteries (and, often, character studies), these are excellent, but as books I actually don’t like them a whole lot, at least partly because they’re so classist and xenophobic. I mean, I noticed this with the Tommy & Tuppence books, but it wasn’t as bad there, and I can tell that it’s being lessened in the adaptations, and I can accept (not like, but muster through) a certain degree of that with older books, but here, Christie frequently had me drawing up short with how frequently everyone but white, upper-class British (and the occasional American) existed only to provide clues, or to show how much better the white, upper-class British people were. This may have almost caused my eyes to become permanently stuck behind my eyelids a few times when the esteemed one had no discernable useful skills and was literally hanging around, waiting for someone to die and hoping they were still in the will.
The books are:
Murder at the Vicarage
The Body in the Library
They Do It With Mirrors
A Murder is Announced
4.50 From Paddington
A Pocket Full of Rye
A Caribbean Mystery
At Bertram’s Hotel
The Moving Finger
Nemesis
Sleeping Murder
And a number of short stories in various collections. I read a collection that was all the Miss Marple short stories
The character of Miss Marple, the “old biddy” sitting in the corner who no one takes seriously but who is actually a brilliant detective who uses her observational skills and knowledge of human nature to solve crimes, is actually only the main character in couple of her books. In most books, she plays a supporting role, and has relatively few scenes in a couple, and the POV characters are often the person she eventually helps, and some books have multiple POV characters. As such, I think the success of individual books depends a lot on how much you like that book’s POV character. While I don’t know if Christie ever actually intended for Miss Marple to be a serial character, I actually think this works interestingly in prose, especially as Miss Marple is frequently isolated from the actual action, and often solves crimes based purely on how events have been related to her (this is more evident in the short stories than in the novels, I think). I remember a Poirot episode where they made a big deal of Poirot being able to do this once, and have to laugh at that now. That said, while it’s interesting in prose form, it’s not something I think would work well on screen, where Miss Marple would likely come across as a bit of a deus ex machina. (Though, that’s basically what she is in the novel for The Moving Finger, where she doesn’t appear until about ¾ through, when the main character is getting absolutely nowhere with anything.) The adaptations, though, also portray her as considerably more worldly than the books, which…doesn’t make her skills less impressive, necessarily, but does remove the “wow, you figured out the killer’s 10 layer alibi while knitting a scarf because of how your neighbor’s gardener was lazy and didn’t weed well?” effect.
As mysteries (and, often, character studies), these are excellent, but as books I actually don’t like them a whole lot, at least partly because they’re so classist and xenophobic. I mean, I noticed this with the Tommy & Tuppence books, but it wasn’t as bad there, and I can tell that it’s being lessened in the adaptations, and I can accept (not like, but muster through) a certain degree of that with older books, but here, Christie frequently had me drawing up short with how frequently everyone but white, upper-class British (and the occasional American) existed only to provide clues, or to show how much better the white, upper-class British people were. This may have almost caused my eyes to become permanently stuck behind my eyelids a few times when the esteemed one had no discernable useful skills and was literally hanging around, waiting for someone to die and hoping they were still in the will.
The books are:
Murder at the Vicarage
The Body in the Library
They Do It With Mirrors
A Murder is Announced
4.50 From Paddington
A Pocket Full of Rye
A Caribbean Mystery
At Bertram’s Hotel
The Moving Finger
Nemesis
Sleeping Murder
And a number of short stories in various collections. I read a collection that was all the Miss Marple short stories