Miss Marple got her start in the Tuesday Night Club, and that series was followed up by stories that took a very similar form: dinner guests listen to someone recount a mysterious event that they either witnessed or had heard about, and then the others engage in a competition to see who can solve it. Of course, Miss Marple always wins, not because she’s a great detective (meaning someone who goes out looking for clues, or questioning witnesses), but because she’s good at just sitting back and drawing on her experience of village life, which always provides a key to understanding what’s really going on.
This happens again in “The Companion,” which was another story I enjoyed even if I thought the solution was too easy. I know it was too easy because I had no trouble figuring it out as I was reading, something that rarely happens. And I managed even though one of the clues was the comparison made between two women, one being a bit plump and the other “inclined to scragginess.” Scragginess is not a word I’ve ever used and I’m not even sure if I’ve seen it before, though I did make the connection to scraggly. So all-in-all a nice little mystery story, with a bit of vocabulary-building thrown in.
Alex Good 
My goodness, you’re going to turn into a regular ol’ Brit with all these words you’re learning, eh, eh?
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I’m keeping a list of them in case I ever visit again.
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They’ll never know they’ve been infiltrated by the King of Maple Syrup Crime…
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Let me remind you of a time when British music and culture rules the world.
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I’d call him shaggy but not scraggy.
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Shouldn’t that be Sh*ggy Raggy?
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Only in the UK. We’re made of stronger stuff.
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That we are!
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I thought I could get away with it in this rather scraggy context.
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You can get away with anything around here.
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A shaggy dog story?
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Like the Shaggy D.A.
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Well no I don’t think so, it’s a metaphor.
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So I take it you don’t know Scraggy in the context of Pokemon?
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I know nothing of Pokemon. Isn’t the yellow blob thing called Pikachu? That’s all I’ve got.
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