Miss Marple, the spinster detective who is one of the most famous characters created by English crime writer Agatha Christie, is portrayed by Joan Hickson who starred in a dozen television mysteries about Miss Marple over the course of a decade. Between 1984 and 1992 the British Broadcasting Corporation in association with Australia's Seven Network and America's Arts and Entertainments Network, produced an irregular series of twelve Miss Marple mysteries. The elderly, deceptively delicate Joan Hickson starred in each of these as the amateur detective from the bucolic village of St. Mary Mead.