Now viewed and the book read, quite possibly re-read, and entertaining both. I also dimly recall the Geraldine McEwan version, brought up to date by tinkering with the plot to give it, inter alia, a gay twist not present in the original - while this Joan Hickson version sticks to the story fairly well.
However, one omission is that of Superintendent Harper who adds the bit of byplay resulting from the application of two police forces to one case. Another is the fact that his colleagues find Inspector Slack as unpleasant as we do. One extra is that the yokel who chances upon the burning car in the quarry is promoted to a full scale village lunatic with a rather larger part than that given to the yokel in the book. One confusion is about the time at which the story is set. The television version appears to be set in the late forties (of the last century), while the book was written in the early forties. The book does include talk of ARPs but this, I suspect is an anachronism and the book is really set at some fairly indeterminate time between the two world wars. It does include talk of a popular car called the 'Minoan 14', which might have been helpful, but all google can tell me about such a car is that it appears in this story. So actually, no. And to think that I had not thought that she would have made such a detail up. One self-reference in that a lad asks Miss Marple whether she is a writer of detective stories at one point.
The story is entirely satisfactory, with the mystery hanging on the identity of the two dead bodies being switched, that is to say with the body of person A being identified as being that of person B and vice-versa. With the result that one of the people whom you think as a red herring is actually one of the murderers and another is nearly one of the murderers in that he moved a body from his sitting room to someone else's library and then lied about it. Not so complicated that you lose your way half way through, as seems to be our normal form with 'Midsomer Murders' these days. And while the plot hangs on the rather chancy misidentification of one of the bodies by one of the villains, at least when you get to the end you feel the thing has been properly tidied up - a feeling we don't usually get with said midsomers.
Andrew Cruickshank was a perfectly satisfactory stand-in for Ian Richardson as Conway Jefferson, the rich & domineering old invalid who fell for a bit of fluff on the make. The bit of fluff who was initially thought to have wound up in the library.
Some old-fashioned slang. For example bottled for drunk, amid what read like authorial disapproval of the average Englishman's partiality for said bottle. More obscure, downy for a particular species of dodgy character, seemingly according to the OED, a pejorative extension of a sense of down meaning wide awake or knowing, a sense from the 19th century. Or possibly of down as in feathers, and so fluffy or all fluff and no bottom. But not quite in the sense of fluff used above.
I was also struck by what read like authorial approval at the opening of Chapter XIII of not taking too much notice of doctors' telling one to calm down and crashing on regardless instead. Better to go down fighting than rotting in a wheel chair.
The film misses the rather nice ending of the book, in which the hotel gigolo, that is to say tennis & dance professional, quietly regrets the slipping of a nice rich widow out of his clutches. But to be fair to the film, not obvious how one would capture such a private thought.
PS 1: following Timothy Spall's reflections of a dying Turner on being about to become a non-entity, I celebrated my continued entitity with a pint of Cumberland from Jennings today, my first pint of warm beer for more than a year. Not bad stuff at all and it served to remind me why I took to the stuff in the first place.
PS 2: illustration not of my copy of the book. Taken from google.
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