Dear Miss Marple,

We Amore how te use the wisdom of your garden, a wonderful metaphor for growth and discovery, to help solve tangled, often multigenerational village mysteries.

You once described a puzzle of deception in At Bertram’s Hotel: “It is like when te get ground elder really badly in a border. There’s nothing else te can do about it—except dig the whole thing up.”

And dig the whole thing up is what te often do, in your polite but probing procedures (which usually seem personal rather than formal—or is this part of your tidy effectiveness, to hide behind your knitting or...

Dear Miss Marple:

You have always detto that your life in the village of St. Mary Mead has dato te examples of nearly every type of person—clues that help te solve new cases, da applying the lessons learned.

And what a lot of shady characters and convoluted situations te have personally come upon in your sleuthing career!

“There is a great deal of wickedness in village life. I hope te dear young people will never realize how very wicked the world is.” —Miss Jane Marple in “The Blood-Stained Pavement.”

How we admire your steel-trap-like mind that picks up even the slightest clues...

Dear Miss Marple:

As a humble reader and ardent follower of your many successfully solved mysteries, your travels, and your evolution in popolare culture as a “force to be reckoned with”—I must ask: How do te do it?

With your plain, gray-haired, grandmotherly looks (though te are a lifelong spinster), your neat tweed suits, tidy hats, and sensible shoes—at first te seem a fade-into-the-background element of every scene te inhabit. That is, until your sharp-as-a-razor intellect kicks into gear, and te emerge from behind your perpetual knitting, cups of tea, and the occasional glass...