Miss Marple

Margaret Rutherford played the first big-screen Marple, very different from the books: big, chatty and full of energy. In Murder She Said, she sees the crime from the train herself and, with no one believing her, takes a housekeeping job at a mansion to find the body.

With loyal Mr. Stringer at her side, she drives Inspector Craddock up the wall and uses a compact as bait to catch the family doctor.

Over the next three films, Rutherford's Marple gets more and more daring. She fakes a heart attack at a dance to lure a killer, joins a theater company and, in Murder Ahoy!, boards an old warship.

In the climax, she sword-fights the killer and is saved only because Mr. Stringer turns up at the right moment.

On the BBC, Joan Hickson plays the Marple the books describe: small, quiet, always knitting. It starts when Dolly Bantry calls her in to see a young woman's body in the library at Gossington Hall.

Marple annoys Inspector Slack, who hates her meddling, but she wins his respect in the end. Her method never changes: listen, compare the suspect to someone in the village and notice what everyone else misses.

On a Caribbean island, Marple strikes up an unlikely friendship with cranky millionaire Jason Rafiel, and together they save a woman's life. Rafiel is so impressed that after his death he leaves her one last case.

He calls her Nemesis, the goddess of justice. Marple takes on the role and, on a coach tour, solves an old crime and frees his son, jailed for a murder he didn't commit.

In the BBC's last story, a Hollywood star buys Gossington Hall, and a fan is poisoned at the housewarming party. Marple, now quite old, relies on her nephew, Inspector Craddock, to question the suspects.

It's a sad case, about an innocent gesture that ruined a life. Marple solves it with her usual calm, and Hickson bows out of the role after eight years.

On ITV, Geraldine McEwan plays a more mischievous, bright-eyed Marple who, over the first three seasons, solves classic cases and even some that weren't hers in the books, including one alongside Tuppence.

From season four, Julia McKenzie takes over with a calmer, more watchful Marple who lasts until the final episode in 2013.

In the books, Marple appears in 12 novels and 20 short stories by Agatha Christie, from The Murder at the Vicarage (1930) to Sleeping Murder (1976). On screen, besides Rutherford, Hickson, McEwan and McKenzie, Angela Lansbury played her in The Mirror Crack'd (1980).