Work

[edit]Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple

Agatha Christie's first novel The Mysterious Affair at Styles was published in 1920 and introduced the long-running character detective Hercule Poirot, who appeared in 33 of Christie's novels and 54 short stories.

Well-known Miss Marple was introduced in The Thirteen Problems in 1927 (short stories) and was based on Christie's grandmother and her "Ealing cronies".Both Jane and Gran "always expected the worst of everyone and everything, and was, with almost frightening accuracy, usually proved right."Miss Marple appeared in 12 of Christie's novels.

During the Second World War, Christie wrote two novels, Curtain, and Sleeping Murder, intended as the last cases of these two great detectives, Hercule Poirot and Jane Marple. Both books were sealed in a bank vault for over thirty years and were released for publication by Christie only at the end of her life, when she realised that she could not write any more novels. These publications came on the heels of the success of the film version of Murder on the Orient Express in 1974.

Like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle with Sherlock Holmes, Christie was to become increasingly tired of her detective Poirot. In fact, by the end of the 1930s, Christie confided to her diary that she was finding Poirot "insufferable," and by the 1960s she felt that he was "an ego-centric creep." However, unlike Doyle, Christie resisted the temptation to kill her detective off while he was still popular. She saw herself as an entertainer whose job was to produce what the public liked, and the public liked Poirot. Feeling tied down, stuck with a love interest, she did marry off Hastings in an attempt to trim her cast commitments.

In contrast, Christie was fond of Miss Marple. However, it is interesting to note that the Belgian detective's titles outnumber the Marple titles more than two to one. This is largely because Christie wrote numerous Poirot novels early in her career, while The Murder at the Vicarage remained the sole Marple novel until the 1940s.

Christie never wrote a novel or short story featuring both Poirot and Miss Marple. In a recording discovered and released in 2008, Christie revealed the reason for this: "Hercule Poirot, a complete egoist, would not like being taught his business or having suggestions made to him by an elderly spinster lady".

Poirot is the only fictional character to have been given an obituary in The New York Times, following the publication of Curtain. It appeared on the front page of the paper on 6 August 1975.

Following the great success of Curtain, Dame Agatha gave permission for the release of Sleeping Murder sometime in 1976 but died in January 1976 before the book could be released. This may explain some of the inconsistencies compared to the rest of the Marple series — for example, Colonel Arthur Bantry, husband of Miss Marple's friend Dolly, is still alive and well in Sleeping Murder despite the fact he is noted as having died in books published earlier. It may be that Christie simply did not have time to revise the manuscript before she died. Miss Marple fared better than Poirot, since after solving the mystery in Sleeping Murder she returns home to her regular life in St. Mary Mead.