Miss Marple's Final Cases and Others (The Christie Collection)

I got my Kindle for Christmas, but the first thing I downloaded had to be special. I thought about the books that got me hooked on reading mysteries as a young person, and I knew that something from Agatha Christie was IT! I was so pleased to find this 3-book collection. It is so reasonably priced, and Miss Marple is just wonderful! If anyone wants books that are so well-written, try these. The Kindle is such a wonderful gadget! Why hasn't it been around years before? My bookshelves wouldn't be so packed!!

Book arrived in good shape and on time. I look forward to reading this series! Thank you!

"Miss Marple insinuated herself so quickly into my life that I hardly noticed her arrival," Agatha Christie wrote in her posthumously-published autobiography (1977) about the elderly lady who, next to Belgian super-sleuth Hercule Poirot, quickly became one of her most beloved characters. Somewhat resembling Christie's own grandmother and her friends, although "far more fussy and spinsterish" and "not in any way a picture" of the author's granny, like her, she had a certain gift for prophecy and, "though a cheerful person, she always expected the worst of everyone and everything, and was, with almost frightening accuracy, usually proved right." Although Christie herself considered Miss Marple her favorite creation - preferred even over the prim and proper Belgian with the many "little grey cells," of whose exploits she occasionally tired and whom she brought back again and again chiefly because of her audience's undying demand - there are only twelve Miss Marple novels and twenty short stories: while no small feat in any other author's body of work, just over one tenth of the lifetime output of the writer justifiedly dubbed The Queen of Crime. This posthumously-published compilation, first published in 1979, unites the last seven short stories revolving around St. Mary Mead's elderly village sleuth. Though Miss Marple had actually -- in addition to the novel "A Murder at the Vicarage" (1930) -- even been introduced to readers in a canon of originally six and, after an expansion for republication in book form, later thirteen short stories, Christie's readers would soon come to cherish her mostly on the basis of the aforementioned twelve novels, each and every one of which is a gem of detective fiction in and of itself. As a short story character, however, after the initial "Thirteen Problems," Miss Marple later only made rare intermittent appearances, whereas the majority of Christie's later short stories centered either around Hercule Poirot, or not around any of Christie's recurring characters at all. In those stories that do, however, feature St. Mary Mead's most famous (and beloved) resident, readers of course also meet a number of other acquaintances from her novel-length adventures; first and foremost her doting nephew - thriller novelist Raymond West - and retired Scotland Yard Commissioner Sir Henry Clithering, as well as village solicitor Petherick, and of course the Bantrys (who would move center stage, much to their embarrassment, in "A Body in the Library," 1942). Add to these Raymond's new flame, artist Joyce (later reincarnated as his wife Joan); as well as, in the later stories gathered in this collection, Miss Marple's niece Diana "Bunch" Harmon, who is married to the vicar of Chipping Cleghorn, a village not unlike St. Mary Mead (see "A Murder Is Announced," 1950), St. Mary Mead's Dr. Haydock, several maids called Gladys, and of course Inspectors Slack and Craddock and Colonel Melchett of Melchester C.I.D. and village Consta

No one can do characterizations like Dame Christie, and she can even do these remarkably well within the confines of a short story. This little book of Miss Marple short stories is a wonderful cap to the entire Miss Marple series. I had read some of them individually, but there were some I had not read before, and I enjoyed them all. My own particular favourite though was "The Case of the Perfect Maid" (an oxymoron if there ever was one). It is remarkable how Ms. Christie can typecast each of her wonderful characters so quickly, and provide us with tricky and intricate mysteries at the same time.