I don't know that you can criticize a Miss Marple story for being absurd, that's what a Miss Marple mystery inherently is, but this one does play out a bit silly. The first third of the mystery actually doesn't feature Marple at all, but rather a detective questioning each and every one of the witnesses to a murder (which happened in the dark) for about 45 minutes. It's actually not terrible to watch, the characters are pretty entertaining and silly, but I don't think it's a very wise way to present things all the same, and certainly isn't great television.
I definitely was not a fan of how the information was presented, the police didn't bother to investigate the crime scene itself, just asked silly old English townspeople to repeat to you a scene you already watched. Then when they finally move on to collecting more clues (largely by questioning other silly English people not strictly from town) the detached nature of the mystery causes things to get shoehorned in, in a rather conspicuous way. I guessed who the killer was correctly only halfway through the whole thing. And then the crimes to cover up other crimes, even though they make the guilty party exponentially more likely to be caught, I guess that's a staple of the genre, but they were especially silly here.
Really, if you had all the actors play it as a joke and directed the script as a comedy, I would never have guessed it wasn't a true satire of Christie. Without changing a single line.
I definitely was not a fan of how the information was presented, the police didn't bother to investigate the crime scene itself, just asked silly old English townspeople to repeat to you a scene you already watched. Then when they finally move on to collecting more clues (largely by questioning other silly English people not strictly from town) the detached nature of the mystery causes things to get shoehorned in, in a rather conspicuous way. I guessed who the killer was correctly only halfway through the whole thing. And then the crimes to cover up other crimes, even though they make the guilty party exponentially more likely to be caught, I guess that's a staple of the genre, but they were especially silly here.
Really, if you had all the actors play it as a joke and directed the script as a comedy, I would never have guessed it wasn't a true satire of Christie. Without changing a single line.