This is the first story in an anthology of new Marple stories written by twelve different authors. I think they must have been specially commissioned by the Christie Estate (Agatha Christie Limited), as the estate holds the copyright, Christie’s name is displayed most prominently on the cover, and the back flyleaf has Christie’s photo and pocket bio. This despite the fact that there isn’t a word in the book that was written by her.

That isn’t something that should put anyone off, however. A lot of franchise fiction is better than the originals. Almost any new James Bond adventure, for example, beats the pants off Fleming’s stuff. And the fact is (or at least in my strongly-held opinion it is) that Christie’s Marple stories weren’t very good. So a line-up of new stories written by bestselling authors is actually something I was looking forward to.

I wasn’t disappointed by Lucy Foley’s entry. It moves quickly, has a nice clue-I-didn’t-notice in the middle, and comes with a good twist at the end, though readers will probably twig to something being off about the killer early on and know that a rug-pull was coming up.

While reading I caught myself smiling at the way Miss Marple and her friend Prudence have to make their way through a dark wood with the aid of a flashlight (or “torch,” as they like to say over there). The reason I got a kick out of this is because we’re told it’s “only about five o’clock or so but it felt much later.” This might seem early for it to be fully dark out, but it’s mid-November (two weeks after Guy Fawkes’ Night) and England runs out of daylight quickly in the late fall.

What made this more interesting though is that Miss Marple gets very technical about the matter of what time it was when she’s interviewed by the police inspector later. He says she was walking through the woods in the evening and she takes exception to this: “You see, it wasn’t the evening. It was a little past five o’clock – though at this time of year, when it gets dark so quickly, it’s so easy to forget.” No, for her “it’s so important to get these things right,” and the fact is she was cutting through the woods in the afternoon.

Was she right? I did some research and it seems as though “evening” is said to begin at either 5 or 6 o’clock. It is only a loose measurement of time that varies in usage, but is usually connected to the setting of the sun. So I don’t know if Jane was correct, and even if she did have a point I don’t think she was right to make an issue out of it. She wants to insist on words being nailed down to a precise meaning so as to avoid being misleading, but I don’t think this was a hill to die on.

The story treats the subject faithfully, which is something that was probably written into the contract. Miss M isn’t fighting alien bodysnatchers or Jack the Ripper’s love child. She’s the familiar Victorian lady (that’s how she thinks of herself, anyway), schooled in human nature, who prefers knitting to just about anything. She also wonders, through experience, “if there aren’t more terrible things happening in England’s villages and hamlets than in its metropolises.” Well, there certainly are whenever she’s around!

Marple index