St. Mary Mead was the fictional village created by popular crime fiction author Dame Agatha Christie.
The quaint, sleepy village was home to the renowned detective spinster Miss Jane Marple. The village was first mentioned in a Miss Marple book in 1930, when it was the setting for the first Marple novel, The Murder at the Vicarage. However, Agatha Christie first described a village of that name prior to the introduction of Jane Marple, in the Hercule Poirot novel The Mystery of the Blue Train, in which it was home to that book's protagonist Katherine Grey.
Miss Marple's St. Mary Mead is described in The Murder at the Vicarage as being in the fictional county of Downshire, but in the later novel The Body in the Library Downshire has become Radfordshire. In the BBC Miss Marple TV adaptation of Nemesis, a letter from Mr Rafiel's solicitors indicate that St Mary Mead is located in the (also) fictional county of Middleshire. The St. Mary Mead of Katherine Grey, however, was in Kent, therefore not connected with Miss Marple's village.
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Famous quotes containing the words mary and/or mead:
“He was high and mighty. But the kindest creature to his slaves—and the unfortunate results of his bad ways were not sold, had not to jump over ice blocks. They were kept in full view and provided for handsomely in his will. His wife and daughters in the might of their purity and innocence are supposed never to dream of what is as plain before their eyes as the sunlight, and they play their parts of unsuspecting angels to the letter.”
—Anonymous Antebellum Confederate Women. Previously quoted by Mary Boykin Chesnut in Mary Chesnut’s Civil War, edited by C. Vann Woodward (1981)
“It is an open question whether any behavior based on fear of eternal punishment can be regarded as ethical or should be regarded as merely cowardly.”
—Margaret Mead (1901–1978)