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Authors: Agatha Christie
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Miss Marple’s Final Cases
Miss Marple Short Stories (1979)
Miss Marple’s Final Cases and two other stories
was published in the UK only, for the stories were already available in other volumes published in the USA. Two of the stories, ‘The Dressmaker’s Doll’ and ‘Sanctuary’, are to be found in
Double Sin
(1961: see p. 301); four stories, ‘Strange Jest’, ‘Tape Measure Murder’, ‘The Case of the Perfect Maid’ and ‘The Case of the Caretaker’, are from
Three Blind Mice
(1950: see p. 237); and the remaining two stories, ‘Miss Marple Tells a Story’ and ‘In a Glass Darkly’, come from
The Regatta Mystery
(1939: see p. 175).
Of the eight stories, two (‘The Dressmaker’s Doll’ and ‘In a Glass Darkly’) are not Miss Marple adventures. The remaining six ought not really to have been called
Miss Marple’s Final Cases
, for they are examples of that redoubtable lady in mid-career. The publisher’s justification for putting together a collection of them was that, although they had appeared in magazines in the past, the stories were being published in volume form for the first time in Great Britain. A statement to this effect appeared in the ‘blurb’ on the inside of the front jacket. It is, however, slightly inaccurate, for ‘Tape-Measure Murder’ had found its way into
Thirteen for Luck
, ‘a selection of mystery
stories for young readers’ which Collins had published in 1966.
Problem at Pollensa Bay
This essay was adapted from Charles Osborne’s
The Life and Crimes of Agatha Christie: A Biographical Companion to the Works of Agatha Christie
(1982, rev. 1999). Mr. Osborne was born in Brisbane in 1927. He is known internationally as an authority on opera, and has written a number of books on musical and literary subjects, among them
The Complete Operas of Verdi
(1969);
Wagner and His World
(1977); and
W.H. Auden: The Life of a Poet
(1980). An addict of crime fiction and the world’s leading authority on Agatha Christie, Charles Osborne adapted the Christie plays
Black Coffee
(Poirot);
Spider’s Web
; and
The Unexpected Guest
into novels. He lives in London.
Agatha Christie is known throughout the world as the Queen of Crime. Her books have sold over a billion copies in English and another billion in 100 foreign languages. She is the most widely published author of all time and in any language, outsold only by the Bible and Shakespeare. Mrs Christie is the author of eighty crime novels and short story collections, nineteen plays, and six novels written under the name of Mary Westmacott.
Agatha Christie’s first novel,
The Mysterious Affair at Styles
, was written towards the end of World War I (during which she served in the Voluntary Aid Detachments). In it she created Hercule Poirot, the little Belgian investigator who was destined to become the most popular detective in crime fiction since Sherlock Holmes. After having been rejected by a number of houses,
The Mysterious Affair at Styles
was eventually published by The Bodley Head in 1920.
In 1926, now averaging a book a year, Agatha Christie wrote her masterpiece.
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
was the first of her books to be published by William Collins and marked the beginning of an author-publisher relationship that lasted for fifty years and produced over seventy books.
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
was also the first of Agatha Christie’s works to be dramatised—as
Alibi
—and to have a successful run in London’s West End.
The Mousetrap
, her most famous play, opened in 1952 and runs to this day at St Martin’s Theatre in the West End; it is the longest-running play in history.
Agatha Christie was made a Dame in 1971. She died in 1976, since when a number of her books have been published: the bestselling novel
Sleeping Murder
appeared in 1976, followed by
An Autobiography
and the short story collections
Miss Marple’s Final Cases
;
Problem at Pollensa Bay
; and
While the Light Lasts
. In 1998,
Black Coffee
was the first of her plays to be novelised by Charles Osborne, Mrs Christie’s biographer.
Christie Crime Classics
The Man in the Brown Suit
The Secret of Chimneys
The Seven Dials Mystery
The Mysterious Mr Quin
The Sittaford Mystery
The Hound of Death
The Listerdale Mystery
Why Didn’t They Ask Evans?
Parker Pyne Investigates
Murder Is Easy
And Then There Were None
Towards Zero
Death Comes as the End
Sparkling Cyanide
Crooked House
They Came to Baghdad
Destination Unknown
Spider’s Web *
The Unexpected Guest *
Ordeal by Innocence
The Pale Horse
Endless Night
Passenger To Frankfurt
Problem at Pollensa Bay
While the Light Lasts
The Mysterious Affair at Styles
The Murder on the Links
Poirot Investigates
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
The Big Four
The Mystery of the Blue Train
Black Coffee *
Peril at End House
Lord Edgware Dies
Murder on the Orient Express
Three-Act Tragedy
Death in the Clouds
The ABC Murders
Murder in Mesopotamia
Cards on the Table
Murder in the Mews
Dumb Witness
Death on the Nile
Appointment with Death
Hercule Poirot’s Christmas
Sad Cypress
One, Two, Buckle My Shoe
Evil Under the Sun
Five Little Pigs
The Hollow
The Labours of Hercules
Taken at the Flood
Mrs McGinty’s Dead
After the Funeral
Hickory Dickory Dock
Dead Man’s Folly
Cat Among the Pigeons
The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding
The Clocks
Third Girl
Hallowe’en Party
Elephants Can Remember
Poirot’s Early Cases
Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case
The Murder at the Vicarage
The Thirteen Problems
The Body in the Library
The Moving Finger
A Murder Is Announced
They Do It with Mirrors
A Pocket Full of Rye
4.50 from Paddington
The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side
A Caribbean Mystery
At Bertram’s Hotel
Nemesis
Sleeping Murder
Miss Marple’s Final Cases
The Secret Adversary
Partners in Crime
Nor M?
By the Pricking of My Thumbs
Postern of Fate
Giant’s Bread
Unfinished Portrait
Absent in the Spring
The Rose and the Yew Tree
A Daughter’s a Daughter
The Burden
An Autobiography
Come, Tell Me How You Live
The Mousetrap and Selected Plays
Witness for the Prosecution and Selected Plays
* novelised by Charles Osborne
For more information about Agatha Christie, please visit the official website.
MISS MARPLE’S FINAL CASES
by Agatha Christie
Copyright © 1979 Agatha Christie Limited (a Chorion company)
“Essay by Charles Osborne” excerpted from
The Life and Crimes of Agatha Christie
. Copyright © 1982, 1999 by Charles Osborne. Reprinted with permission.
Greenshaw’s Folly
taken from
The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding
© Agatha Christie Mallowan 1960.
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ePub edition edition published June 2004 ISBN 9780061748066
This e-book was set from the
Agatha Christie Signature Edition
published 2002 by HarperCollins
Publishers
, London.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
First published in Great Britain by Collins 1979
For more information about Agatha Christie e-books visit www.perfectbound.com/agathachristie
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