john_amend_all

Now Christmas is over, I think I might as well finish these off.

DCI Slack: Bit less of the size 12 boots approach, eh, lads?

An old friend of Miss Marple's, one Ruth van Rydock, asks her for help. Ruth is worried about her sister, Carrie Louise. Could Miss Marple possibly visit Carrie Louise's house and investigate the situation?

In stark contrast to the sun-drenched Caribbean, here we're back to a setting very like the story before last: a Victorian mansion suffering from the effects of postwar austerity, and inhabited by a large and dysfunctional family. The similarity of the settings is even lampshaded by Chief Inspector Slack, as he sets up his latest incident room: "What's this? Another blooming farmyard?"

The main difference, this time around, is that this mansion serves as a reformatory for young offenders. It thus provides a limitless supply of violent and/or troubled young men. The chief psychiatrist, a stock white-coated Freudian, opines that everybody is a little bit mad; and certainly, just about everybody on the premises seems to be trying to live up to this philosophy.

No sun. No sea. No sand. There are still corpses, though.

The prime suspect in the murder (for there is, of course, a murder) is Edgar Lawson, one of the 'nutcases' from the reformatory. The question is, were his highly suspicious actions on the night in question just part of his mental instability, or was someone taking advantage of his fragile mental state? Neal Swettenham's performance as Edgar can be unsettling at times, particularly in the sequence where Inspector Slack decides to bully a confession out of him. Miss Marple assures us at the summation that Edgar's madness is a pretence, but the end of the scene leaves the question open.

Your psychoanalyst may say one thing, Lawson, but I say another. And my treatment is free.

Slack, by the way, isn't in the book, but there is an excuse of sorts for bringing him back; his sidekick, Sergeant Lake, is. Slack's reunion with Miss Marple is played for laughs — about the only thing in the story that is. On his initial arrival, he announces his presence to the assembled suspects in the traditional manner and the drawing room. He doesn't see Miss Marple, but she's a little surprised to hear his dulcet tones.

Doubtless she'd read the book and was expecting the understated Inspector Curry.

The following day, she returns the compliment. Slack, who appears to be developing a degree of Genre Savvy, almost seems to be expecting "that old busybody from St Mary Mead" to show up — and promptly hears her polite "Good morning, Chief Inspector" from behind him. He then has to compose himself, while listening to the busybody in question greeting his sergeant as an old friend.

But the cat came back, the very next day...

As is traditional in these matters, there's a murder in which we only see the murderer's hands. In this case, it takes place in the reformatory's theatre, a suitably dark and sinister location with numerous opportunities to drop things on unsuspecting victims. However, the murderer shows a lamentable disregard for standards in not wearing black leather gloves.

Turning to the events of the story itself, the adaptation follows the broad outlines of Christie's plot, making the occasional tweak here and there. The murderer's motive is still fraud, but rather than to finance a fairly silly future plan, the money is being stolen to maintain the status quo. Another character who dies in the book survives here. The cast has also been trimmed slightly: Doctors Maverick and Baumgarten combine to become Doctor Maseryk, and the minor rôle of Miss Bellever is subsumed by Mildred Strete.

I noticed that the incidental music was playing games again at one point; as Sergeant Lake reads out the letter the first victim was typing, the writer's leitmotif plays. But it doesn't play over the last two sentences, and these are the two which are factually incorrect.

This entry was originally posted at http://john-amend-all.dreamwidth.org/42098.html. Feel free to comment there or here.