Agatha Christie’s great-grandson claims Miss Marple is depicted as younger character

Agatha Christie’s great-grandson has claimed the fictional detective Miss Marple – who is portrayed as an elderly woman – is actually younger than the author made her out to be. Dame Agatha Christie, who is said to have created the character to be inspired by her own grandmother, was known for her detective novels. But now her great-grandson Mathew Prichard has claimed that Miss Marple, who is a detective featured in 33 of the author’s novels, is actually a younger woman.

Agatha Christie’s great-grandson has claimed that the detective novelist portrayed Miss Marple as a much younger character in her books than she was in reality. The 94-year-old, who lives in the US, told the Sunday Times that Dame Agatha took inspiration for the elderly spinster from her housekeeper. But in the book series, she is depicted as a woman in her 60s or 70s, when in reality Christie was in her 40s when she wrote her first Miss Marple novel. The author, who died in 1976, described her as ‘an old lady who lived in the village and knew everybody’.

Agatha Christie’s great-grandson has claimed that the character of Miss Marple, who is the heroine of more than two dozen of the crime writer’s novels, is not as old as has been portrayed. William Barton, 60, who has written a new book about the woman who inspired the character, said that the writer had envisaged the sleuth as ‘a tough 85-year-old spinster’.

In an extract from his book, he says: ‘My great-grandmother had created a tough 85-year-old spinster in Miss Marple, but she wasn’t that age when she started writing the stories. Miss Marple was around 60 when The Murder At The Vicarage was first published in 1930.’ He claims that the author ‘had a bit of a laugh with her publisher over the amount of mileage she could get out of Miss Marple’. He added that she ‘didn’t want to be a clichéd old woman’. His claims come after a number of influential figures in the literary world stepped in to defend Miss Marple from the accusation that she is actually too young.

Agatha Christie’s great-grandson has claimed that the character of Miss Marple was actually older than the version portrayed in her novels. William Wright, the writer’s great-grandson, has said that she was actually in her late 80s when the books were published and that she was ‘re-imagined’ as a younger woman. In a book entitled The Secrets of Old Maude: The Real Miss Marple , Mr Wright claims that Christie originally created the character as a retired dressmaker in her late 50s.