The Murder at the Vicarage

The Murder at the Vicarage is a mystery novel by the English writer Agatha Christie, first published in Britain by the Collins Crime Club on 20 October 1930 and in the United States later in the same year.

It is the first novel in which Miss Jane Marple appears. She had been in short stories before, from December 1927, and those were collected in book form in 1932 as The Thirteen Problems. The village is St Mary Mead, and she is a woman who has spent a long life watching her neighbours.

The narrator is the Reverend Leonard Clement, the vicar, and the murdered man is Colonel Protheroe, a magistrate who was disliked by nearly everybody who knew him. He is found shot in the study, and the shot was not heard by anybody in the house.

The evidence against the obvious suspects is complicated by Protheroe's wife, who says she did it, and by the artist who had been painting in the village. In 2025 the BBC included the book in its list of the ten most ingenious murder mysteries written for page or screen.