A very slight story but nonetheless effective, and one that plays fair with the reader. I mean, it helps if you have Christie’s (and Miss Marple’s) encyclopedic knowledge of toxins, but you might twig to what’s going on without it. And once again the matter of gender age gaps plays a big part. No doubt this is a reflection of the time, when it would be assumed that a man of means would marry a woman young enough to be his daughter, but if Miss Marple and Christie are right that human nature is a constant everywhere and at all times, then we’re getting on too high a horse if we complain about it. This is what Miss Marple’s remembered story from the village and Mr. Badger marrying his young housekeeper alerts her (and us) to. “Don’t tell me it’s absurd for a man of sixty to fall in love with a girl of twenty. It happens every day. . . . These things become a madness sometimes.” Indeed they do.

As a postscript, I’ll add that it’s in this story that someone finally explains the meaning of SA to Miss M. I’d mentioned before how it’s never spelled out, but that I figured it must refer to sex appeal. And so it does. Or, as Miss Marple puts it, “What in my day they used to call ‘having the come hither in your eye.’”

Marple index