This was a bit of a disappointment. I had my hopes up as the curtain rose on a dinner at an Oxford college that Miss Marple was attending as a guest. We’re introduced to the usual bunch of eccentric academics, who naturally all hate each other. That’s what faculty are like. Then one of them, the master no less, does a face plant in his roast venison in the middle of delivering a speech, apparently having overdosed on some of his own date-rape drugs.

The year is given as 1970, which struck me as well past Miss Marple’s expiry date. I mean, she’d been an old lady in The Murder at the Vicarage, which had been published in 1930. But then in At Bertram’s Hotel (1965) she was only in her mid-70s or so. I guess she’s just one of those fictional characters who goes on forever at the same age, no matter how much the world changes around her.

And the world has changed. This story, by Naomi Alderman, is on the surface a proto-#MeToo tale, as the murdered master is a lech whose passing upsets no one. My disappointment with it though has to do with the fact that I was pretty sure whodunit from the first page (a clue is presented in a pretty obvious way), but Alderman didn’t play fair on letting us follow Miss M’s thinking in coming to her conclusions. Not that Christie always did this either, and the gimmick here of Miss Marple remembering some village incident from years ago that we know nothing of is as frustrating as usual. But here it’s quite a stretch, compounded by how frankly ridiculous the killer’s motives were. Christie certainly came up with some ridiculously theatrical and contrived plots, but on the question of motive she was usually pretty clear and simple.

Then again, these are university people. And they’re not the best . . . or the brightest.

Marple index