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Authors: Agatha Christie

BOOK: Miss Marple's Final Cases

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Charles Osborne on
Miss Marple’s Final Cases
Miss Marple Short Stories (1979)

Miss Marple’s Final Cases and two other stories
was published in the UK only, for the stories were already available in other volumes published in the USA. Two of the stories, ‘The Dressmaker’s Doll’ and ‘Sanctuary’, are to be found in
Double Sin
(1961: see p. 301); four stories, ‘Strange Jest’, ‘Tape Measure Murder’, ‘The Case of the Perfect Maid’ and ‘The Case of the Caretaker’, are from
Three Blind Mice
(1950: see p. 237); and the remaining two stories, ‘Miss Marple Tells a Story’ and ‘In a Glass Darkly’, come from
The Regatta Mystery
(1939: see p. 175).

Of the eight stories, two (‘The Dressmaker’s Doll’ and ‘In a Glass Darkly’) are not Miss Marple adventures. The remaining six ought not really to have been called
Miss Marple’s Final Cases
, for they are examples of that redoubtable lady in mid-career. The publisher’s justification for putting together a collection of them was that, although they had appeared in magazines in the past, the stories were being published in volume form for the first time in Great Britain. A statement to this effect appeared in the ‘blurb’ on the inside of the front jacket. It is, however, slightly inaccurate, for ‘Tape-Measure Murder’ had found its way into
Thirteen for Luck
, ‘a selection of mystery
stories for young readers’ which Collins had published in 1966.

Problem at Pollensa Bay

About Charles Osborne

This essay was adapted from Charles Osborne’s
The Life and Crimes of Agatha Christie: A Biographical Companion to the Works of Agatha Christie
(1982, rev. 1999). Mr. Osborne was born in Brisbane in 1927. He is known internationally as an authority on opera, and has written a number of books on musical and literary subjects, among them
The Complete Operas of Verdi
(1969);
Wagner and His World
(1977); and
W.H. Auden: The Life of a Poet
(1980). An addict of crime fiction and the world’s leading authority on Agatha Christie, Charles Osborne adapted the Christie plays
Black Coffee
(Poirot);
Spider’s Web
; and
The Unexpected Guest
into novels. He lives in London.

About Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie is known throughout the world as the Queen of Crime. Her books have sold over a billion copies in English and another billion in 100 foreign languages. She is the most widely published author of all time and in any language, outsold only by the Bible and Shakespeare. Mrs Christie is the author of eighty crime novels and short story collections, nineteen plays, and six novels written under the name of Mary Westmacott.

Agatha Christie’s first novel,
The Mysterious Affair at Styles
, was written towards the end of World War I (during which she served in the Voluntary Aid Detachments). In it she created Hercule Poirot, the little Belgian investigator who was destined to become the most popular detective in crime fiction since Sherlock Holmes. After having been rejected by a number of houses,
The Mysterious Affair at Styles
was eventually published by The Bodley Head in 1920.

In 1926, now averaging a book a year, Agatha Christie wrote her masterpiece.
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
was the first of her books to be published by William Collins and marked the beginning of an author-publisher relationship that lasted for fifty years and produced over seventy books.
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
was also the first of Agatha Christie’s works to be dramatised—as
Alibi
—and to have a successful run in London’s West End.
The Mousetrap
, her most famous play, opened in 1952 and runs to this day at St Martin’s Theatre in the West End; it is the longest-running play in history.

Agatha Christie was made a Dame in 1971. She died in 1976, since when a number of her books have been published: the bestselling novel
Sleeping Murder
appeared in 1976, followed by
An Autobiography
and the short story collections
Miss Marple’s Final Cases
;
Problem at Pollensa Bay
; and
While the Light Lasts
. In 1998,
Black Coffee
was the first of her plays to be novelised by Charles Osborne, Mrs Christie’s biographer.

The Agatha Christie Collection
Christie Crime Classics

The Man in the Brown Suit

The Secret of Chimneys

The Seven Dials Mystery

The Mysterious Mr Quin

The Sittaford Mystery

The Hound of Death

The Listerdale Mystery

Why Didn’t They Ask Evans?

Parker Pyne Investigates

Murder Is Easy

And Then There Were None

Towards Zero

Death Comes as the End

Sparkling Cyanide

Crooked House

They Came to Baghdad

Destination Unknown

Spider’s Web *

The Unexpected Guest *

Ordeal by Innocence

The Pale Horse

Endless Night

Passenger To Frankfurt

Problem at Pollensa Bay

While the Light Lasts

Hercule Poirot Investigates

The Mysterious Affair at Styles

The Murder on the Links

Poirot Investigates

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd

The Big Four

The Mystery of the Blue Train

Black Coffee *

Peril at End House

Lord Edgware Dies

Murder on the Orient Express

Three-Act Tragedy

Death in the Clouds

The ABC Murders

Murder in Mesopotamia

Cards on the Table

Murder in the Mews

Dumb Witness

Death on the Nile

Appointment with Death

Hercule Poirot’s Christmas

Sad Cypress

One, Two, Buckle My Shoe

Evil Under the Sun

Five Little Pigs

The Hollow

The Labours of Hercules

Taken at the Flood

Mrs McGinty’s Dead

After the Funeral

Hickory Dickory Dock

Dead Man’s Folly

Cat Among the Pigeons

The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding

The Clocks

Third Girl

Hallowe’en Party

Elephants Can Remember

Poirot’s Early Cases

Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case

Miss Marple Mysteries

The Murder at the Vicarage

The Thirteen Problems

The Body in the Library

The Moving Finger

A Murder Is Announced

They Do It with Mirrors

A Pocket Full of Rye

4.50 from Paddington

The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side

A Caribbean Mystery

At Bertram’s Hotel

Nemesis

Sleeping Murder

Miss Marple’s Final Cases

Tommy & Tuppence

The Secret Adversary

Partners in Crime

Nor M?

By the Pricking of My Thumbs

Postern of Fate

Published as Mary Westmacott

Giant’s Bread

Unfinished Portrait

Absent in the Spring

The Rose and the Yew Tree

A Daughter’s a Daughter

The Burden

Memoirs

An Autobiography

Come, Tell Me How You Live

Play Collections

The Mousetrap and Selected Plays

Witness for the Prosecution and Selected Plays

* novelised by Charles Osborne

www.agathachristie.com

For more information about Agatha Christie, please visit the official website.

MISS MARPLE’S FINAL CASES
by Agatha Christie

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ePub edition edition published June 2004 ISBN 9780061748066

This e-book was set from the
Agatha Christie Signature Edition
published 2002 by HarperCollins
Publishers
, London.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

First published in Great Britain by Collins 1979

For more information about Agatha Christie e-books visit www.perfectbound.com/agathachristie