Miss Marple's kind nephew Raymond has sent her on a vacation to St Honoré to soak up some sunshine after she's been unwell. She's staying at the Golden Palm resort, filled with visitors from around the world though the plot sticks pretty much to the Brits and Americans. One visitor, Major Palgrave, likes to tell long rambling stories of his colonial days and Miss Marple makes the perfect audience. As a genteel lady of a certain age, she has perfected the art of making gentlemen believe she's listening avidly while in reality she's pursuing her own thoughts or counting the stitches in her knitting. But when Major Palgrave suddenly dies, Miss Marple is convinced that it's connected to a story he was telling her about how he once met a murderer. If only she'd been paying more attention! Struggling to recall the details and also feeling a little out of her element so far from home, Miss Marple realises that she can still use village parallels even amongst these strangers - human nature, she finds, is the same everywhere...
While I don't consider this to be one of Christie's very best, it's still a very entertaining mystery and the exotic setting gives it an added interest, although (like many tourists) Miss Marple never sets foot outside the resort so we get very little feel for what life for the real islanders may be like. Another of the residents is Mr Rafiel, an elderly invalid with a grumpy temper. At first inclined to dismiss Miss Marple as a gossipy old woman, he finds she stands up to him more than most people and comes to respect her insight, so that gradually they begin to work together to find the truth. The other residents, including Mr Rafiel's staff, become the pool of suspects and Miss Marple knows that her only investigatory tool is the art of drawing people out through conversation. Happily people do love to gossip so she soon has plenty of background on the potential suspects, although she has to sift through conflicting stories to get to the truth.
Agatha Christie was long before political correctness, of course, and I see from other reviews that some people think her portrayal of the islanders is racist. I don't, but that may be because of my age. It seems to me that Christie speaks as respectfully of the black characters as of the white - her dialect sounds a bit clunky, perhaps, and she comments, though not disparagingly, on different customs, but surely we can still do that, can't we? Mind you, I've also seen reviews calling the Miss Marple books ageist - baffled - and sexist - baffled again. She was merely reflecting the society in which she lived. (I am glad I've lived most of my life in an era when people weren't scrutinising every word and expression looking for reasons to be perpetually outraged. It must be so exhausting.)
This time I listened to the audiobook narrated by Joan Hickson, whose portrayal of Miss Marple I love. However, it must be said that she can't do Caribbean accents at all and her islanders therefore come over as kind of caricatures and rather off-putting to modern ears. Perhaps this wouldn't have been an issue when she recorded the book but I think modern listeners would expect something that sounded a little more authentic. This is one case where reluctantly I'd definitely recommend reading rather than listening.
Agatha Christie
An enjoyable book, particularly for readers who have been disappointed previously to find that Miss Marple doesn't always have a big role in the books she's in. In this one, she's very definitely the central character and we're given access to her inner thoughts, not just about the crime, but about ageing and about life in general. Rightly or wrongly, I've always seen Miss Marple as Ms Christie's alter-ego in these later books (it was published in 1964, when Christie would herself have been 74), and so I always feel we're getting a bit of insight into her view of modern society - not always "woke", I grant you, but always true to her age and time.
While I don't consider this to be one of Christie's very best, it's still a very entertaining mystery and the exotic setting gives it an added interest, although (like many tourists) Miss Marple never sets foot outside the resort so we get very little feel for what life for the real islanders may be like. Another of the residents is Mr Rafiel, an elderly invalid with a grumpy temper. At first inclined to dismiss Miss Marple as a gossipy old woman, he finds she stands up to him more than most people and comes to respect her insight, so that gradually they begin to work together to find the truth. The other residents, including Mr Rafiel's staff, become the pool of suspects and Miss Marple knows that her only investigatory tool is the art of drawing people out through conversation. Happily people do love to gossip so she soon has plenty of background on the potential suspects, although she has to sift through conflicting stories to get to the truth.
Agatha Christie was long before political correctness, of course, and I see from other reviews that some people think her portrayal of the islanders is racist. I don't, but that may be because of my age. It seems to me that Christie speaks as respectfully of the black characters as of the white - her dialect sounds a bit clunky, perhaps, and she comments, though not disparagingly, on different customs, but surely we can still do that, can't we? Mind you, I've also seen reviews calling the Miss Marple books ageist - baffled - and sexist - baffled again. She was merely reflecting the society in which she lived. (I am glad I've lived most of my life in an era when people weren't scrutinising every word and expression looking for reasons to be perpetually outraged. It must be so exhausting.)
This time I listened to the audiobook narrated by Joan Hickson, whose portrayal of Miss Marple I love. However, it must be said that she can't do Caribbean accents at all and her islanders therefore come over as kind of caricatures and rather off-putting to modern ears. Perhaps this wouldn't have been an issue when she recorded the book but I think modern listeners would expect something that sounded a little more authentic. This is one case where reluctantly I'd definitely recommend reading rather than listening.
Agatha Christie
An enjoyable book, particularly for readers who have been disappointed previously to find that Miss Marple doesn't always have a big role in the books she's in. In this one, she's very definitely the central character and we're given access to her inner thoughts, not just about the crime, but about ageing and about life in general. Rightly or wrongly, I've always seen Miss Marple as Ms Christie's alter-ego in these later books (it was published in 1964, when Christie would herself have been 74), and so I always feel we're getting a bit of insight into her view of modern society - not always "woke", I grant you, but always true to her age and time.