john_amend_all

Please tell everybody in the house I want to see them in the drawing room in fifteen minutes.
—Inspector Craddock, adhering strictly to tradition.

There are a number of possible 'last' cases for Miss Marple. There's Sleeping Murder, the last one published, or there's Nemesis, the last one written. However, since the BBC had dealt with both of those already, they ended up (by design or mischance) with The Mirror Crack'd From Side To Side. As a 'last' case, it isn't at all a bad choice: the return of Dolly Bantry (and Gossington Hall) makes a nice bookend, and it's also the book that most directly deals with the themes of change and Miss Marple coming to terms with her advanced age. (In later books she becomes more sprightly and active again).

The book is explicitly set decades after The Murder at the Vicarage — long enough that the Vicar's son, an embryo at the end of TMATV and an infant in The Body in the Library, is now a grown man. Many things have changed in St Mary Mead. A new housing estate is springing up on the outskirts of the village, Colonel Bantry is dead, and his widow has moved out of Gossington Hall into the lodge. The Hall has been sold to Marina Gregg, a film star. Marina's reaction to her new home: "I want to die here!"

You will, Marina, you will.

On the day that the village fête is held in the grounds of Gossington Hall, a local woman by the name of Heather Badcock drinks a cocktail apparently meant for Marina, collapses, and dies. Dolly Bantry, who witnessed the course of events, reports that at the time Marina was staring past Heather at one of the guests on the stairs, with an expression... well, like this.

"The curse has come upon me."

Presumably, then, Marina recognised somebody, and that somebody tried to kill her.

In the book, the police arrive in the form of Inspector Craddock, called in from Scotland Yard. The televised version, no doubt because this is a reunion and a grand finale, throws trusty old Slack and Lake into the mix, with Slack now promoted to Superintendent. He seems to be making at least an effort to tone down the shouting and ill-temper, even suggesting that Craddock should use tact in dealing with the case. Which is rich coming from him, of course.

One oddity is that Miss Marple is retconned into being Craddock's aunt, and this is true to the book — at least, in the book he calls her 'Aunt Jane' all the time. Perhaps he married a niece of hers?

Miss Marple has other problems than just a murder. Apparently she's now too frail to live on her own, so a live-in carer has been inflicted on her, in the form of the appalling Miss Knight.

This is a woman who uses expressions like "Tootsie-bye" and means them.

Miss Marple thus has two problems to contend with: the murder of Heather Badcock, and the question of how to get rid of Miss Knight, preferably without resorting to a murder of her own.

In general outline, the adaptation is the usual close match for the book, though Miss Marple tends to accompany Craddock on more of his investigations rather than sit at home and use him as her legman. A few plotlines have been excised or truncated (for example, the red herring about who Marina's first husband was) and at least one murder has been removed. One deleted scene I do miss is the one where Miss Marple is exploring the new housing estate, testing whether her detective abilities work on the inhabitants as well as they do on the village folk, and on the spur of the moment tells a young woman that her fiancé is really not the man for her. It works, too: a few chapters later, they've broken up.

Miss Marple's salvation from Miss Knight comes in the form of her cleaning lady, Cherry Baker. Cherry's a fun character and one that I wish had shown up more in the series; she'd have been a useful ally for Miss Marple, and they could even have grown into a master/apprentice relationship. In the book she's from Huddersfield, but here her accent is more Mummerzet.

But you, you can see it. And when you see it, I see it.

Another exchange that unfortunately didn't make it into the adaptation is where they're discussing Miss Knight. Cherry refers to Miss Knight as (IIRC) "that old jellybag". A few lines later, Miss Marple starts to say "that old—" and catches herself just in time.

Once again, the incidental music makes generous use of the Sexophone. But rather than being played at the arrival of the gorgeous, blonde, empty-headed starlet Lola Brewster, it tends to accompany Ardwyck Fenn, who is middle-aged, bald-headed and male. I presume it's meant to represent his train of thought.

Just to cement its links with the start of the series, the production has cameos by a couple of characters from Murder at the Vicarage: Miss Hartnell (whose presence is entirely justified: she's mentioned in the book as still living in the village) and the Reverend Hawes, who seems to have put his days of helping himself from the collection plate firmly behind him, and become the Vicar proper.

There's also an amusing case of self-insertion:

Those names in the production credits are terribly familiar.

So, having rewatched the series, what are my overall impressions?

Firstly, the shows stand up very well. They aren't, perhaps, as lush as a modern-day version would be, but hardly any of the effects or techniques have dated badly. There isn't, for example, any use of Video Inside / Film Outside, or any weirdness in the lighting. It just goes to show what the BBC could do at the time when they put their minds (and budget) to it.

Secondly, Joan Hickson is still the one and only Miss Marple. All the others I've seen have been overplayed in one way or another; Hickson remains the only one who convinces me. I didn't realise, until I listened many years later to the audiobook versions of some of the stories, that she was deliberately adopting a different voice for Miss Marple, not using her normal speaking voice.

(An aside: In the light of the recent BBC Great Expectations, I found that someone had uploaded the 1981 Dicks/Letts version to YouTube, in which Joan Hickson played Miss Havisham. Thus).

I learned a couple of other oddities while doing these, connected with Photobucket's ability to provide statistics on the top five files viewed each day. Firstly, the first picture in one of these postings tends to get a lot more downloads than any of the others. I'm not sure why — maybe there's a browser that prefetches the first image on a page, in the hope that someone might click on it? And secondly, I get tens of views of one particular image each day, nearly all via Twitter. The image in question? One of my scans of Bluebell News regarding the filming of Downton Abbey. The spoiler-free version; the spoilery one is nowhere. Is someone using it as their background? Very odd.