A Miss Marple Collection (Miss Marple Mysteries) - The Complete Short Stories

This was a very enjoyable Agatha Christie book (as usual). I really like the short stories because you could put the book down for a while and then pick it up again and read another story. Each story was interesting and enjoyable. Thanks again for a great Agatha Christie book.

I enjoy reading short stories during my daily ferry ride I must take to get to work, I like these as well as her other stories that I can read in the limited time on the boat. .Agatha Christie is famous for a good reason

Miss Marple: the Complete Short Stories
I have read every Miss Marple book. I love this book of short stories and it is a book I can read over and over and never get tired of it. Every Miss Marple fan needs to buy this book.

This is a nice little book of stories. They're all very short and you can read the whole thing before falling asleep. They feel a little under-developed, but most of them make sense vis a vis the clues and the solution of the problem, and who doesn't like Miss Marple?

I loved many Agatha Christie stories in the past and felt these would be just as compelling. While I enjoyed them, they did not have the same level of mystery and did not hold my attention quite as expected.

I'm not sure why I thought these Miss Marple stories would echo the TV shows, but of course they didn't. They did however sit beautifully in their space, filling the mystery readers mind with what ifs.
Christie surely was a master of words.

I love Agatha Christie books, she leaves hints for the reader to guess who the murderer is but I never can tell. Really interesting stories about people and what makes them tick. Miss Marple is a lovely character too, I always like her view of the world. She always expects the worst in her sweet, matter of fact way and is so often right. But she is never smug or self righteous.

This collection starts with "The Thirteen Problems". Then continues with more short stories. As usual Agatha Christie knows how to spin a story, and Miss Marple is a special type of detective, always right, according to her friends.

I read them all and loved them all. I highly recommend them to any Agatha Christie fans. As a avid reader I found while travelling short stories suite me. I am about to read Poirot's 50 short stories. My goal in life would have to be to have the ability to write like Agatha Christie.

I read them all and loved them all. I highly recommend them to any Agatha Christie fans. As a avid reader I found while travelling short stories suite me. I am about to read Poirot's 50 short stories. My goal in life would have to be to have the ability to write like Agatha Christie.

"Miss Marple: The Complete Short Stories" is a collection of twenty short mysteries featuring Miss Marple. Though written as contemporary mysteries, they are now historical mysteries. A few of the stories mentioned a historical (or British) thing where I couldn't figure out what meant. Perhaps this was because they were short stories or because some of them were early in her career. I've never had this problem with Agatha Christie's novels.

The mysteries were clever, and they could be solved. I was a little disappointed that the title of one of the short stories gave away the whodunit. Overall, I'd recommend this book to "puzzle mystery" lovers, especially to Miss Marple fans.

Table of Contents:

From The Tuesday Club Murders:
The Tuesday Night Club
The Idol House of Astarte
Ingots of Gold
The Bloodstained Pavement
Motive v. Opportunity
The Thumbmark of St. Peter
The Blue Geranium
The Companion
The Four Suspects
A Christmas Tragedy
The Herb of Death
The Affair at the Bungalow
Death by Drowning

From The Regatta Mystery:
Miss Marple Tells a Story

From Three Blind Mice:
Strange Jest
The Case of the Perfect Maid
The Case of the Caretaker
Tape-Measure Murder

From Double Sin:
Greenshaw's Folly
Sanctuary

I've been enjoying Agatha Christie's Miss Marple series, but this was the first short story collection of hers I had read. Sadly, it was underwhelming.

The theme of this collection is that Miss Marple and five friends gather regularly to hear a mystery (titular club). Each story in the collection is told by one of them, and that person knows the resolution. Everyone makes a guess, but it is Miss Marple who unerringly zeroes in on the truth. But, the stories are very short, with little substance. And so, Marple's solutions come off too contrived. Obly two of the stories really stood out: Miss Marple's own (the longest) and the last (which wasn't part of the club).

Overall, I think Christie is better suited to short novels. These stories are okay, but I won't be rushing to read more in other collections.

The brilliant mind of Dame Agatha Christie (1890-1976) created two of murder mystery fiction's greatest characters: the debonair and eccentric Belgian Hercule Poirot and old maid Jane Marple. While Poirot wears seven league boots solving murders all over the globe,Miss Marple has lived her entire life in the English village of St. Mary Mead. Nevertheless, Marple sports an incredible ability to ferret our murderers and solve crimes.!
This book is a collection of all twenty short stories in which Miss Marple appears. Most of the stories were published in
"Thirteen Problems" in 1932. The additional seven stories are culled from ther short stories colletions written over the long career of Christie.
The nettlesome cases are discussed in antimated conversation during the meeting of THE TUESDAY NIGHT CLUB. The club meets at the home of Jane Marple. Members of the exclusive club of friends consists of Miss Marple and five other persons. Each club member must present a "problem" which the five others seek to solve. Miss Marple always discovers who the murderer is in the case. The members of the club are Miss Marple the hostess; her novelist nephew Raymond West; Joan Lempiere an artist; Mr. Petherick a lawyer;
Dr. Pender the local vicar and Sir Henry Clithering the well known Scotland Yard Commissioner who has retired. Clithering stands in respectful awe of Miss Marple's uncanning ability to solve crimes. All of the club members are bright as they seek answers to the foul deed of murder.
In later tales in the collection the Tuesday Night Club gathers at the home of Colonel and Dolly Bantry. All of the short tales are well written with most having been produced for television. The stories are great light reading for a comfortable night at home on a rainy night or a trip to the beach for sunny days. Enjoy! Nothing profound but just good entertainment from the mistress of murder!

Miss Marple is my favorite of Agatha Christie's detectives and this series of short stories is a delight. The premise is that each of the guests at a dinner party shares a mystery. Of course, Jane Marple is the only one who gets every single one right. That's why we love her. The stories shared are fun and entertaining, easily read in a short time. Great literature? No. Great Fun? Oh, yes!

I enjoyed this collection of Miss Marple short stories, although I prefer the long form novels featuring the intrepid spinster detective. Many of these stories are tales recounted by other characters in a kind of story-telling club (think Isaac Asimov's Black Widowers books) with Miss Jane Marple providing a satisfactory answer to the puzzle. For me the best stories involved murders where Miss Marple is either on the scene, is consulted or is called to the scene of the crime. These type of stories were more involving and less formulaic.

Although these stories are enjoyable, they are best consumed in small doses over a period of weeks. Highly recommended.

Miss Marple The Complete Short Stories is a wonderful collection of lighter works by Agatha Christie, offering a chance for the reader to solve multiple lighter cases--with the help of the infallible Miss Marple.
With her legendary knitting needles and gentle-mannered intelligence, Miss Marple quietly sits knitting in the background and solves the case every time.
A delightful collection of various short stories, some notable mysteries include The Tuesday Night Club, The Bloodstained Pavement, The Herb of Death, The Affair at the Bungalow, Strange Jest, and The Case of the Perfect Maid, to name a few.
A must for any Agatha Christie fan, this collection of short stories is a nostalgic and classic addition for the mystery reader.

Who wouldn't love her stories? She is the best at short cozies! So curl up in your favorite blanket and enjoy. Each delightful story is short enough to read in one sitting. While you're eating breakfast or before you fall asleep, these will keep you company!

What to say about Miss Marple? In general, the Miss Marple stories are Christie at her workmanlike best, providing entertainment for folks who know what they like and what they expect, and they read Christie because they know she provides what they expect. It's not great literature, it's often not even terribly good writing, but it's nearly always effective storytelling, engaging entertainment. And that's enough.

The words quoted above appeared in a short story by Agatha Christie called "The Four Suspects." They were not spoken by Miss Marple but by "that well-groomed man of the world, Sir Henry Clithering," retired now and residing in St Mary Mead or nearby, but "until lately Commissioner of Scotland Yard." The words were addressed to Sir Henry's new neighbour, a certain Miss Jane Marple. There is EVERY reason to assume that Miss Marple agreed.

An earlier reviewer quoted a short passage from "An Autobiography" by Christie. I shall quote a little more extensively from the same source: "Miss Marple," wrote Dame Agatha, "insinuated herself so quickly into my life that I hardly noticed her arrival. I wrote a series of six short stories for a magazine, and chose six people whom I thought might meet once a week in a small village and describe some unsolved crime. I started with Miss Jane Marple, the sort of old lady who would have been rather like some of my grandmother's Ealing cronies--old ladies whom I met in so many villages where I had gone to stay as a girl. Miss Marple was not in any way a picture of my grandmother; she was far more fussy and spinsterish than my grandmother ever was. But one thing she did have in common with her--though a cheerful person, she always expected the worst of everyone and everything, and was, with almost frightening accuracy, usually proved right...."

Later, she added, "Miss Marple was born a the age of sixty-five to seventy--which, as with Poirot, proved most unfortunate, because she was gong to have to last a long time in my life. If I had had any second sight, I would have provided myself with a precocious schoolboy as my first detective; then he would have grown old with me."

The first sextet of magazine stories were published in the late 1920s but did not achieve the dignity of book publication until 1932, two years after the publication of "Murder at the Vicarage," the first novel to feature Miss Marple.

The 1932 volume contained the first sextet of stories mentioned by Christie in her autobiography, plus a second sextet and one more story to provide a satisfactorily ominous title for the collection, "The Thirteen Problems." (In the US, the book appeared--less happily--as "The Tuesday Club Murders.") Christie wrote seven more short stories for Miss Marple. They all are included in this volume. The later stories are good enough, but Miss Marple had so grown in stature that her true milieu was the full-length mystery novel.

I suggest that special note be taken of the tenth story, "A Christmas Tragedy." This story represents a sea change in Miss Jane Marple. In all prior appearances she had been a mere device, a voice through which the author could resolve her little puzzles. With this story, the fully developed, elderly, tough as nails, knitting Nemesis of the novels emerges.

These twenty stories are competent, if not brilliant. No-one, least of all Agatha Christie, would call them literature. They are amusements, clever puzzles set to dialogue. As such, most of them are splendid. There are a couple of minor misfires, one in which the solution to a coded message is in English when by the logic of the story it should have been in German, another in which Christie chose to emulate the mechanically-oriented stories common in those days among the works of her less-talented contemporaries. A classic Christie work incorporates some deceptively simple example of what might be called mental sleight-of-hand. Stories that depend on gimmicked mechanical implements and the like seem somehow beneath Dame Agatha's dignity.

Reading these stories quickly demonstrates that Agatha Christie was born one of nature's great re-cyclers. Dame Aggie had a strong tendency to ... ahem, quote from herself when a good plot was involved. For those who would put a more positive spin on the simple facts, then it might be said that within these stories may be found seeds that later sprouted into full-length mystery classics such as "A Murder is Announced" and "Murder Under the Sun."

The collection, I was surprised to discover, was dedicated to Leonard and Katherine Woolley. Sir Leonard Woolley was a great archeologist who famously excavated the ancient city of Ur in Sumeria, a land that would one day come to be known as southern Iraq. He became a media superstar when he dug down through the artifact-laden soil of Ur to find a very thick layer almost entirely free of man-made remains, and beneath that yet another layer of artifacts. Woolley attributed the break in the artifact layers to an extensive flood--or as he suggested a bit prematurely and the newspapers shouted loudly to all the world, not a flood but The Flood. When the shouting was at its height, Christie was already a world-famous author and an enthusiastic traveler. She visited the dig at Ur and stayed on for some time to lend a hand. There she met and fell in love with archeologist Max Mallowan, whom she married in the same year that she published "Murder at the Vicarage."

Doubtless, anyone who has slogged this far is wondering why I've wandered so far off-track with all this biographical blather. The reason is simply that I am astonished to see Katherine Woolley's name in the dedication. When Christie arrived, Lady Woolley was very much in residence at her husband's archeological site. She regarded herself as Queen of all she surveyed and she went out of her way to make sure that the upstart mystery novelist knew it. Christie got on with Leonard Woolley, but she simply could not abide his wife. In one of her novels, she made a perfectly obvious caricature of Lady Woolley into the murderess. When she transformed the book into a stage play, Christie slyly converted her novel's villainess into her play's comic relief.

This collection of the twenty Marple short stories are, as I've said, not literature themselves, nor even necessarily vintage Christie. Nevertheless, they are clever, entertaining and an invaluable memento of one of the great literary characters of the Twentieth Century.

Five stars for Agatha, for Jane and for St Mary Mead.

Agatha Christi has long been one of my favorite English mystery writers. I regard her work as classic of the English type stories. The stories bring insights to the characters and personalities of the people with whom Ms. Christi lived, whom she observed and then wove into her tales of suspense.
Even murder in the English mystery story is somehow less offensive, less graphically brutal, even tho as tragic as some of our more modern mystery stories. Interesting, but not as difficult to experience, in my view. The stories leave you mentally stimulated, but not emotionally drained.

Long Live Dame Agatha and her genre!

These are fun and low-pressure for the reader (like you don't have to be scared your detective is gonna get murdered or anything, because in many of them someone is telling other people the story at a dinner party later on, and they all have to solve it.)

I read this as a teen years ago, but found it recently at Half Price Books and acquired it to read it again. I like the book and Christie's way of hiding the truth of her mysteries from the reader (until the end), mainly because it causes the reader to think. Developed cognitive skills seem so lacking in America (and in the world) these days. Mrs Marple is an elderly spinster who never fails to solve the murder du jour based on an understanding of the nature of human character and their habits. Scotland Yard sometimes seeks her aid as does the local Constable. A delightful read.

This book is about a little old lady named Miss Marple who sits around and listens to people try to solve mysteries. Everyone thinks she is really quiet and dosen't really know what's going on. Boy are they in for a surprise!!!!!!!! I really liked this book beacuse it is mystery and humor mixed together.

This short story collection is wonderful! Twenty delightful stories featuring Miss Jane Marple solving difficult cases. Miss Marples sharp observations, her spunk, wit, and intelligence shine through in these tales, making clear why Agatha Christie has created one of the greatest female sleuths of all time. If you're a fan of Christie's or Marple's, you can't go wrong with this colleciton.

This collection of Miss Marple short stories highlights many of the things I find interesting about Christie, as well as some oWf her weaknesses. Christie's strength lies in setting up complicated plots and drawing out rich characters in all of their particularities. The short story format, then, takes away Christie's greatest strength. What is left are bare-bones Christie-style stories.

Each story in this collection is a whodunit, usually featuring a murder. Everyone is either bewildered, or convinced that the wrong person is guilty, except, of course, for Miss Marple. Christie affords no energy to the set-up; most of these stories begin with a group telling each other stories. The solutions to these stories involve knowledge of all sorts of things with which the average reader will have little familiarity, such as the uses and results of certain poisons.

Perhaps most striking to me was just how weak the character of Miss Marple actually is. There's simply very little to her, except a conviction that young people are foolish. The introduction to the volume tries to argue otherwise, but I am not convinced.

Christie aficionados will certainly want to read this volume, but I would recommend one of Christie's novels to the uninitiated.

How is this considered a classic is beyond me. On top of the multiple typos found in the book, which made the reading irritating, the characters all have stereotypical predictable roles.

Also, the stories are cheesy and seemed to have been thought out by a 12 years old.

I'm glad I just borrowed the book from the library.

My rating is not based on Agatha Christie's writing (Who am I to knock Edgar Alan Poe's literary daughter?), but of the misleading listing. I purchased this edition for my vision-impared mother, because the vendor listed it as "large print". It is not "large" enough for a reader who needs LARGE print.

As with all short story collections it is sometimes hit and miss but all the stories are worth reading. The Miss Marple stories give an insight in to how some well know plot devices evolved. And the macabre stories showed another side of Agatha Christie's talent.