Marple
23rd April 2023
Marple is a short-fiction anthology, featuring 12 stories about the titular character, Miss Marple, as created by Agatha Christie, each told by a different contemporary author.
As individual stories, I found them a mixed bag, with my favourites coming in the second half of the collection. Some of them I found harder to read than others, and some of them I wasn’t sure I was really following. A couple of the authors I’m encouraged to look out for and try their own creations.
As a collection, they do well to emulate the world of Marple, and bring in a lot of connections back to Christie’s original stories. I noticed a few references to Bertram, and there’s a lot of appearances for Raymond. Possibly it sometimes felt like there maybe could have been a little more effort to avoid the same references repeating.
I don’t really think that short fiction is my thing, and so I suspect I was never going to be as into this collection as I wanted to be, but it was an interesting diversion for a couple of train journeys.
