CBS has signed a deal to develop a new series featuring Agatha Christie's famous amateur sleuth/busybody, but while no one's been cast yet, you'd be surprised at who they're looking for.

According to Variety magazine, the show is planning to cast a "much younger" actress for the character. Miss Marple will now be a young woman who inherits her grandmother's bookshop and, therefore, for some reason starts solving mysteries in her small California town.

This involves cutting at least a couple of decades off the character's age. Indeed, Christie has said that she based Miss Marple on her own grandmother.

Of course, CBS has had some luck radically changing British characters to suit American TV. "Elementary" has yielded three hit seasons for the network so far by transforming Sherlock Holmes from a pipe-smoking London gentleman to a tattooed and angry young man in New York City -- not to mention transforming Dr. Watson into a woman.

Previous actresses who've played Marple on TV have been much closer to her description in the books: Geraldine McEwan and Julia McKenzie, for example, who played her on the most recent series, produced for ITV in Britain and PBS over here, were 72 and 67, respectively.

Fans of the British-TV sensibility shouldn't give up on this one too quickly, though. The new series will reportedly be written by David Wolstencroft, whose series "MI-5" was a huge hit for the BBC from 2002 to 2011.

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