Marple: The Bloodstained Pavement

/ Alex Good

Joyce Lemprière tells what seems to at least some of the Tuesday Night Club members to be a simple ghost story involving her premonition of a woman’s death. (As an aside: Joyce is going to end up marrying Randy, though I don’t recall anything suggesting that in any of the stories thus far. But in this one she calls Miss Marple “Aunt Jane” before immediately correcting herself: “Miss Marple, I mean.” An understandable mistake for anyone to make, but one that her soon-to-be Auntie will pick up on in her Tuesday night story.)

I didn’t think much of this story because I thought I knew what was going on but the one clue is deliberately, indeed literally erased. It’s obvious that blood is dripping from the red dress on the balcony onto the pavement below, so why aren’t there any bloodstains when Joyce goes to check for them just a couple of minutes later? Even diluted, there should still have been some evidence of blood, and we’re told she “examined the pavement closely.” In my opinion this isn’t playing fair with the reader. Either she imagined the bloodstains or they were really there. You can’t have it both ways.

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16 thoughts on “Marple: The Bloodstained Pavement”

  1. Haven’t read any Marple, so can’t really say much. I looked up one of the other reviews of it and that didn’t help either, except the other one says Joyce painted the bloodstains on the pavement.

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    • Hm. Joyce was painting the scene and had painted bloodstains because she’d seen them. But then when she checked they were gone. But it seemed to me that if they’d been there they couldn’t have disappeared so quickly. But maybe I’m confused. A lot of the clues in Christie are pretty obscure, but something just didn’t seem right about this one.

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