john_amend_all

I'm sure it's not a coincidence that the last four Miss Marple books to be adapted by the BBC were the ones which had previously been done as films. I'd guess it was a rights issue; fortunately, whatever it was, it must have been resolved, and the four remaining books were done as one-off telemovies. The first of these is 4:50 from Paddington; coincidentally, in a previous adaptation (the film Murder She Said) Joan Hickson had played Mrs Kidder, the housekeeper.

The show begins with a marvellously atmospheric opening sequence: two trains depart from Paddington, one at 4:33 and one at 4:50. Some way down the line, the later train overtakes the earlier one; as it does so, a blind snaps up and a woman is seen being strangled. The sequence presents the appearance of having had a great deal of care and attention lavished on it; Marylebone stands in for Paddington, and the trains are the best the Severn Valley Railway could provide. At the time no preserved railway in the UK had a suitably long section of double track where one train could pass another in the manner depicted here, so one was built for the purpose.

Yes, I'm a trainspotter.

For once, the time placement of the book is almost an exact match for the film: it's been moved a mere couple of months. The book opened on 20 December 1957, the film on 4 October 1957.

In the book, the main police detective is Inspector Craddock, of A Murder is Announced, accompanied by a local detective who does not appear elsewhere in the books. For some reason Craddock isn't present here (perhaps John Castle wasn't available?) and so the balance is reversed; Craddock is replaced by a Suspiciously Similar Substitute, one Chief Inspector Duckham, and the lion's share of the investigation is given to a returning Inspector Slack.

He is, as ever, delighted to see Miss Marple.

When the police make a search of the railway, they fail to find any trace of a body. It's therefore down to Miss Marple to prove that any murder took place, let alone find the murderer. Having determined that it was most likely thrown from the train in the vicinity of a decaying Victorian mansion, Rutherford Hall. Unable to infiltrate it on her own, she calls on the services of, for want of a better term, a legman: Lucy Eyelesbarrow, Oxford bluestocking and domestic goddess for hire.

She's got a maths degree, so she's got to be good.

That covers the first fifteen minutes or so of the film. The remainder is centred around the hall, with Lucy making her investigations among the more or less dysfunctional members of the Crackenthorpe family, attempting to investigate the murder in between cooking meals and trying to keep everything (and everyone's lives) tidy. She quickly makes herself not only indispensible but irresistible to the family: not quite to the extent of the book, where every adult male in the building hits on her, but she still has her choice of clean-cut war hero Bryan, or Cedric, artist and womaniser. The latter is played by John Hallam, familiar to Whovians as Light in Ghost Light.

Don't listen to him, Lucy! He only wants to dismantle you to see how you work!

The second most atmospheric sequence is the one leading up to Lucy's discovery of the body. There's a definite nod to Indiana Jones, as she finds herself exploring the Long Barn, which is hung with cobwebs and packed with statues, mummies, and sarcophagi.

I expect there's at least one alien artefact in there, too.

While the adaptation is in general very faithful, there are one or two slight tweaks to the story, mostly serving as improvements. In the book, the murderer gets impatient for no clearly-defined reason and starts taking out the family members. By contrast, in the adaptation he's given a reason (the victim knew too much) and at least tries to make the death look like an accident. The question of whether one of the family had married a Frenchwoman is also resolved without the outrageous coincidence that the book uses.

Although Lucy is the person on the spot for most of the story, Miss Marple still finds plenty to do. This includes, at the climax, revealing the murderer — which involves putting herself, if only briefly, in a situation where he'd be able to do her violence if he realised what a danger she represented to him. She then gets to deliver the summation, with Joan Hickson once again showing Miss Marple's inner steel.