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Little Old Lady Investigates: Difference between revisions
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[[File:murdershewrote on the right 7287.jpg|link=Murder, She Wrote|frame|Watch out, crime.]]
{{quote|''"Miss Marple. She's not going to frighten [[The Yardies]] is she? 'Leroy, give her the gun, she have a hat!'"''
|'''[[Lenny Henry]]'''}}
{{quote|''"Policemen asking questions are being policemen, but little old ladies asking questions are just being [[Obfuscating Stupidity|little old ladies]]."''
|'''Miss Marple''', ''[[Miss Marple]]''}}
There's a subgenre of [[Mystery Fiction]] called "Cozy Mysteries", a prevalent trope of which is the little old lady investigator. She is an older lady, usually retired, usually a [[Cool Old Lady]], who has a knack for solving mysteries and who is [[Always Murder|always solving murders]] [[Busman's Holiday|wherever she goes.]] She's usually an [[Amateur Sleuth]], but occasionally she works for an agency or is a registered [[Private Detective|PI]]. The fact that people seem to keep dropping dead around her often makes her a [[Mystery Magnet]]. This sub-genre is also known as the "tea cozy mystery".
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More realistic takes on the concept have her solving minor misdemeanors and crimes which the police are too busy to solve. The most famous '''Little Old Lady Investigates''' character is probably Agatha Christie's [[Miss Marple]].
{{examples}}▼
▲{{examples}}
== [[Anime]] and [[Manga]] ==
* ''[[Yattokame Tanteidan]]'', a 2007 kids anime series about a young girl who solves mysteries with the help of her candy store owning grandmother and her grandmother's friends. As Japan has different social taboos on what kids' anime can contain, there are murders in this series.
* ''[[Detective Conan]]'' has one episode where Kogoro is invited to a gathering of other famous detectives in the adult category as opposed to Shinichi's teen detective peers. Numbered among them is a little old lady detective who seems to have worked frequently with the two-fisted man of action private detective perhaps because their opposite strengths combine effectively. This ends up becoming a [[Subverted Trope]] since {{spoiler|the little old lady uses her status as being [[Beneath Suspicion]] to ''murder'' her partner, and plan to do the same to everyone else}}.
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* An episode of the 1998 anime series ''Master Keaton'', "A Case for Ladies", has the titular hero team up with an elderly English woman to solve a murder. The elderly woman displays quite a bit of genre savviness, as she unfavorably compares Keaton to Humphrey Bogart and Steve McQueen.
== [[
*
* Finnish ''[[Donald Duck]]'' comic artist Kari Korhonen has put Grandma Duck in this role.
* ''Prudence Petitpas'' was created by Maurice Maréchal in 1957 and got recently her own animated show.
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* [[Agatha Christie]]'s [[Miss Marple]] is the [[Trope Codifier]]. In one book she explains her success like this: "Policemen asking questions are being policemen, but little old ladies asking questions are just being little old ladies."
** Dame Agatha's Tuppence Beresford of the [[Tommy and Tuppence]] books uses many aspects of the Little Old Lady Investigates, but isn't a pure version because she prefers to work on instinct, has a partner in her husband Tommy, and often works under the auspices of an official branch of the government. In ''N or M?'', though, she essentially plays this straight while undercover as a doddering housewife and acting essentially as an independent agent.
* [[Dorothy Gilman]]'s Mrs. Pollifax is a little old lady investigative ''[[CIA]] agent''. It's a bit more believable when you learn that she was originally hired by the CIA as a decoy courier by accident when her file was inadvertently placed in the "people we can use for this decoy run" stack instead of the "people we've reviewed and rejected" stack, but her [[Nosy Neighbor]] and [[Weirdness Magnet]] tendencies, combined with a very no-nonsense common-sense approach to whatever trouble she landed in<ref>Not to mention her karate training.</ref>, led her into more and more active assignments—this while still being essentially a part-timer who works for the CIA to keep her retirement years from being boring.
** There's been two movies made featuring Mrs. Pollifax, the second was a made-for-TV movie in 1999 starring... you guessed it... Angela Lansbury.
** Mrs. Pollifax isn't quite the normal little old lady either, as witnessed by the not more closely described "karate chop", which she delivers to many a foe, who is [[Tap on the Head|invariably rendered unconscious]].
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* Marion Mainwaring wrote a comic novel called ''Murder in Pastiche: or Nine Detectives All at Sea'' featuring pastiches of famous detectives. Miss Fan Sliver was an [[Expy]] of Miss Silver (with touches of Miss Marple) representing the whole school of Little Old Lady Investigates mysteries.
* Simon Brett's Mrs. Pargeter is indeed a little old lady. On the other hand, she's the widow of a professional career criminal, and so has access to inside knowledge & contacts, which isn't so little-old-lady-like.
* Ellen
== [[Live
* Jessica Fletcher ([[Angela Lansbury]]) in ''[[Murder, She Wrote]]'' is arguably the most famous TV variation.
* In the ''[[Columbo]]'' episode "Murder by the Book," Jack Cassidy and Martin Milner portray the co-authors of the [[Show Within a Show|Mrs. Melville mysteries]]. Columbo creators [[Levinson and Link]] would later create Jessica Fletcher.
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** Sometimes she is hired to investigate larger crimes with a clear bias, such as when a young girl keeps turning up at the scenes of arsons and her mother hires Hetty to find another suspect.
* Mrs Bradley (Diana "[[The Avengers (TV series)|Emma Peel]]" Rigg) in ''The Mrs. Bradley Mysteries''. (Although the small and "bird-like" Mrs Bradley of the books is a better example.)
* ''[[The Snoop Sisters]]'', a 1970s-vintage series starring Helen Hayes and Mildred Natwick. With that surname, [[Prophetic Names|it was inevitable]]...
* In the BBC children's series ''[[Marlene Marlowe Investigates]]'', Marlene was assisted by her interfering Aunt Maud.
* ''[[Rosemary & Thyme]]'', though they are more middle-aged than elderly. One of them (Laura Thyme) is an ex-cop, the other (Rosemary Boxer) is an ex-biology professor, now they're professional gardeners and amateur sleuths.
== [[Video Games]] ==
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