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Miss Marple first appeared in a series of six short stories in Britain's The Sketch magazine. She was a member of the Tuesday Club, a discussion group that met in the quiet Kentish village of St. Mary Mead to discuss unsolved crimes. Other members included the vicar; Miss Marple's nephew, a successful novelist; his fiancée Joyce, an artist; and others. However, it was Miss Marple who always arrived at the solutions to the crimes.
These short stories were collected with seven others written especially for the volume as The Thirteen Problems, two years after Miss Marple's first novel appearance, in Murder at the Vicarage.
Miss Marple was not the first spinster detective - that honour belonged to Anna Katherine Green's Amelia Butterworth - but she is the one everyone thinks of when the concept arises. Miss Marple was based on Christie's own grandmother, a pleasant woman who nevertheless, according to Christie, "expected the worst of everyone and everything" and was usually right. A precursor of the character in Christie's own work is Caroline Shepherd in the Hercule Poirot novel The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. A spinster like Marple, Shepherd has the same interest in gossip and the same knack for knowing what's going on.
When we first meet Miss Jane Marple she is very much the stereotypical spinster of the last century - blue-eyed and frail, wearing a black lace cap and mittens, and constantly knitting. She is also a gleeful gossip and not especially nice. She modernizes and becomes nicer over the years - there are twelve years between the first Marple novel and the second, The Body in the Library, although some short appearances intervened.
Miss Marple is able to solve difficult crimes not only because of her shrewd intelligence, but because St. Mary Mead, over her lifetime, has put on a pageant of human depravity rivalled only by that of Sodom and Gomorrah. No crime can arise without reminding Miss Marple of some parallel incident in the history of her time.
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