Leonard Clement
The vicar of St. Mary Mead and narrator; his idle wish to see Colonel Protheroe removed from the world comes home when the man is shot at his study desk, and he spends the book as a decent, wry amateur investigator and Miss Marple's chief audience.
Miss Marple
The elderly next-door neighbor, dismissed by Griselda as the most dangerous cat in the village; watching everything from her garden, she demolishes both false confessions, counts seven possible suspects, reconstructs the entire conspiracy, and designs the trap that ends it.
Lawrence Redding
A charming young painter and war veteran whose false confession is really strategy; he planned the murder, hid his own pistol in the vicar's study, forged the note, rigged the decoy shot, and finally tried to poison Hawes to close the case, before being caught and tried.
Anne Protheroe
The colonel's quiet second wife, desperately in love with Redding; her own confession collapses on Miss Marple's evidence, but she is the one who actually fired the silenced shot, and she stands trial beside her lover.
Colonel Lucius Protheroe
The victim: a deaf, loud, self-righteous churchwarden and magistrate disliked by the whole parish, killed just as he was about to audit the church accounts and have his antique silver professionally valued.
Griselda Clement
The vicar's much younger, mischievous wife; her prank telephone call to Mrs. Price Ridley, made with Dennis, tangles the timetable, an anonymous letter briefly casts suspicion on her, and she ends the book expecting a child.
Lettice Protheroe
The colonel's vague-seeming daughter, far shrewder than she acts; convinced of Anne's guilt, she plants an earring to incriminate her stepmother and slashes an attic portrait to protect Mrs. Lestrange, who is secretly her mother.
Mrs. Lestrange
The village's mystery woman, really Protheroe's first wife and Lettice's mother, dying and living under an assumed name to see her daughter; her stubborn silence about her movements makes her the book's most elegant red herring.
Dr. Haydock
The humane village doctor whose firm medical timing destroys Redding's fake confession; he shields Mrs. Lestrange, an old love, preaches that crime is illness rather than sin, then abandons theory in a fury when Hawes is attacked and baits the final trap.
Mr. Hawes
The nervy High Church curate, a survivor of sleeping sickness who has been quietly stealing church funds; named in Protheroe's genuine last letter, he is drugged and framed by Redding as a remorseful suicide, and barely survives.
Inspector Slack
The rude, tireless investigating officer who refuses to hear about the fast clock, chases a blackmail theory, and ends up with official credit for a solution he never found.
Colonel Melchett
The Chief Constable, bluff and skeptical of elderly ladies, who is gradually argued into accepting Miss Marple's reconstruction and authorizes her trap.
Dr. Stone
The supposed archaeologist excavating Protheroe's barrow, actually a professional cracksman impersonating a real scholar in order to swap the Old Hall silver for copies; his flight by train is a red herring cleared of the murder.
Gladys Cram
Stone's loud, cheerful young secretary, who carries the suitcase of loot into the woods at midnight; suspected, interrogated, and finally cleared as a dupe rather than an accomplice.