pwme I do love Agatha Christie and read her often. There are times in her stories where great cruelty toward the most vulnerable take place. This is one of those stories. I don't care for the plot at all, though it was very clever and very well done.So if you want a story line where only the monsters and creeps reap what they have sown, this is not that kind of story.

Paul Evans The sleepy peaceful home of the Bantry's is woken to the shattering news that the body of a young platinum blond woman has been found in the Library. Somehow she seems unreal, Dolly Bantry seeks the help of her friend Jane Marple, and the pair seek to unravel the mystery, enquiries lead them to the seaside.This version mirrors the book in so many ways, it's a truly faithful adaptation, as the saying goes 'if it ain't broke don't fix it.' I understand that a few elements are missed, but it would have been impractical to attempt to squeeze it all in.Straight away Joan Hickson shows us why she is the definitive Miss Marple, endorsed by Agatha Christie herself, she'd play the role from 1984 - 1992 and make it her own. She is truly wonderful, even after her introduction you just know that she is Miss Marple.Other performances I liked, firstly Gwen Watford, she is delightful as the ditsy Dolly Bantry, so excited that a body has been found, she clearly loved a bit of drama, I'm so glad she returned in the final episode too. David Horovitch played Slack so well, I can see why he was made a recurring character, I'm sure he was overused but I get why. Trudie Styler is a brilliant Josie Turner, she helps to make the ending quite brilliant, all in a look.It is very long, they certainly put as much of the book in it as possible, it's very faithful, possibly guilty of being a little slow in parts. That somehow seems not to matter, it's a gorgeous production and well worth watching. 8/10

sissoed Spoilers ahead!I've seen this 1984 Joan Hickson version several times over the years, and I always like it, which is why I give it an "excellent" 10-level rating. But last night on seeing it again, it struck me: how can it be that the "rock solid" alibi for several characters is that they were in the presence of the murder victim, with many other witnesses seeing all of them together, while the victim was alive? An alibi has to apply to the period of time during which the victim was killed, not earlier, while everyone knew the victim was alive. Yet this is how the alibi for the eventual killers is described several times by the police. The real way the alibi worked is that the killers were seen in the presence of the victim while the victim was alive, and then remained in public, visible to many witnesses, continuously for at least an hour after the victim left everyone's presence, right up to and beyond the very latest time that the police later state is the latest moment that the victim (being elsewhere) could have been killed. Think about this strategy for a moment from the viewpoint of the killers, in planning their murder. They have to get a double, whom they will dress-up to impersonate the victim, and kill the double early enough in the day that when the police find the body and do their estimate of the time-of-death, the latest time-of-death the police will come up with happens to be within the window of time after the real victim leaves public view but while the killers are still in public view. But they also have to wait long enough before killing the double that the moment of the latest time-of-death is after the victim has left public view of the witnesses. That's cutting it pretty fine, and requires the killers to have a very good idea of how the police go about determining a victim's latest time-of-death. They also have to gamble that one of them will be called to view the body and make the identification (calling the substitute the real victim) and that no one else will be called on to make an identification. Otherwise, the substitution trick fails, and with it, so too fails the determination by the police of the latest time-of-death. One other interesting point: the killers planned to frame the film-studio man for the murder, leaving the body of the "double" at his house. He foils this temporarily by moving the body to the Bantry home - home of the rich squire of the county. Inadvertently, this saved him from the frame-up -- because it brought in and focused the excellent detectives on this case. It brought in not only Miss Marple, as friend to the Bantrys, but also the regional police Chief, because he was a neighbor to the Bantrys, and because the Chief would give special attention to anything affecting the Squire. Moving the body anywhere else, or leaving it in his own home, would have left the film-studio man at the mercy of the bone-headed detective who fell for the frame-up, because Marple would not have become involved and the Chief would not have given the case so much attention. Thus the film-man's moving the body to the Squire's house proved to be a disaster for the killers, because it brought in a swarm of detectives along with Miss Marple, all looking to find the killers. The killers certainly never expected that. The inadvertent lesson for us: if you want a murder to get solved, drag innocent rich people into it -- they'll have the money and insider connections to bring vast resources to bear on finding the real killer, not so much to pursue justice, but to clear their own names.

tedg Spoilers herein.Detective mysteries are one of the most lavishly adventuresome experiences in literature, if one is interested in how narratives are constructed. The contract between reader and writer is rather complex, often involving virtual contracts with some of the characters as well. Christie is a master of these tricks.Christie and Sayers usually put a character in the story to denote this ambiguity of realities: either a writer or a moviemaker. Here it is a movie fellow. (In "Death in the Clouds" it was a detective writer with a multiple personality disorder, and one of the persons was the fictional detective!)The BBC takes all these intellectual adventures, all these notions of multiple parallel realities and flattens them to productions of lush setting and colorful characters. A real shame and we shouldn't put up with it.But in this case at least, we have two redeeming qualities: the first is the way the director has chosen to handle the staging. It is remarkably intelligent: many of the perspectives use very creative camera perspectives. Lots of the talky recounting sessions are very cleverly presented, most notably that of the dance partners, which we see over and over. Each time is slightly but significantly different.Which brings us to the other asset. Trudie Styler, whose assertive, confident presence is a perfect counterpoint to Hickson's practiced withdrawal.The technical aspects of the story are interesting as well. Old detective stories were of the form: a body is discovered in a manor and the inhabitants are the suspects. The impossibility of who did it and how is the game. Here, the rules of the game are all adjusted. Many people do not know the others. The place and body are usually the anchor of such stories. Everything must tie to that navel. Here that anchor is cleverly fooled with.Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.