Miss Marple: The Complete Short Stories: A Miss Marple Collection (Miss… (1997 original; edició 2011)

All of the short stories featuring Miss Marple in one collection. Excellent for dipping into. Miss Marple's trademark, of course, is finding similarities between the rivalries, jealousies and crimes of village life and the cases she is presented from the larger world to illustrate the uniformity of human nature.

In this collected short stories... gathered together for the first time here, the secret of Miss Marple's longevity as an amateur sleuth becomes quite clear - besides being adorable, de formidable old lady with the china-blue eyes is absolutely brilliant at solving murder mysteries. Every one of these lethal little gems is a perfectly crafted example of the classic mystery story.

I read this to the family starting back in the summer and have doled the stories out piecemeal ever since. It's so strange to me that my kids were so into the stories. My wife lost interest pretty quickly, but the kids really wanted more Miss Marple. I'd read a story and then ask if they got it, and often enough they wouldn't have understood. So, having read some formal old fashioned prose to them and had them not understand what it even meant, I was never really clear on what they found so appealing about the stories. We've read most of the Sherlock Holmes stories and a couple of novels over the last few years (and a few Poirot stories too), and I've always been puzzled by their continued enthusiastic interest.

For my own part, I enjoy these sorts of stories well enough but don't love them. For light-weight stuff like this, I suppose I'd rather see it dramatized on TV really, since aside from the odd chuckle or bit of cleverness, there's not a whole lot to them beyond basically simple portraiture and plot contrivance. ( )

In some ways I like the Miss Marple short stories more than the full length (though short) full novels. ( )

Several people try to tell Miss Marple stories she can't deduce the solution to, they all fail. ( )