Storyteller duties now fall to Miss Marple’s nephew Raymond West. Raymond is a recurring character in the Marple canon, and he’s often made gentle fun of because he’s so full of himself and because he’s an author. One suspects not a very successful author. He’s also the most dismissive of Miss Marple, which we might not judge him too harshly for since he’s probably had to put up with her false humility and always being right for most of his life. So as you’d expect he makes a bit of a fool of himself here and Sir Henry even roars with laughter at him at the end. Sure Raymond is a self-important blowhard in a lot of ways, but to be honest I usually feel a bit sorry for him.

Anyway, there’s a clue here having to do with the fact that the events described take place over Whitsuntide. This is a holiday I always have to look up whenever I see it mentioned because I can never remember what it is. I don’t think it gets celebrated much if at all outside of the UK. In brief, Whitsunday is the seventh Sunday after Easter, so it’s meant to celebrate Pentecost.

If none of this means anything to you, and it means close to nothing to me, then you probably won’t get the significance of Whit Monday, which stopped being an official bank holiday in the UK way back in 1972. Like “banting” and “hundreds and thousands” in “The Tuesday Night Club,” this is another bit of early twentieth-century British culture that has all but disappeared in the twenty-first, at least on this side of the pond.

Instead of being cued into the reference to Whitsuntide, which I totally missed, what triggered me was the idea that the wealthy Newman “had no maids living in the house. Two middle-aged sisters, who lived in a farmhouse nearby, came daily to attend to his simple wants.”

No live-in maid! I’m sorry, but that just doesn’t cut it for a member of Christie’s comfortable class. Something was clearly wrong here. How are only two women, even coming in daily, going to be able to attend to all of a single man’s simple wants? Impossible, I say!

Marple index