Murder is Over-Complicated

The second episode of Marple saw a version of Murder is Easy, which was one of the first Agatha Christies I ever read, at a very tender age. I absolutely loved the story at the time, marvelling at the cleverness of the plot, and I still think it’s a really good whodunit, featuring an English village with a body count to rival Midsomer. The book doesn’t feature Jane Marple, as the detecting is done by Luke Fitzwilliam, but I very much enjoyed the first part of the tv episode, in which Fitzwilliam acts in effect as Miss Marple’s foil.

My enjoyment was enhanced by a splendid cast, with actors as likeable as Tim Brooke-Taylor, and as admirable as Sylvia Sims, taking relatively minor parts, as victims bumped off before anyone realises that a homicidal maniac is at work. The screenplay by Stephen Churchett had a number of neat touches, and Churchett himself appeared, as a coroner in a scene that didn’t really have a great deal of legal realism about it, although frankly that is par for the course with inquests in television shows.

Unfortunately, by the time we were about two-thirds in, the story began to falter alarmingly. I blame the fact that the writer had been asked to provide a script lasting for two hours rather than ninety minutes (back to a theme of yesterday!) So, to expand an already elaborate mystery, we had a young man with learning difficulties taught about sex with disastrous consequences, including incest, rape, abortion and murder. Needless to say, none of this bore any relationship to Christie’s original plot.

I think that if you want to improve on Christie’s plots when adapting her work, you have to be extremely good at plotting, and my feeling was that the whole edifice collapsed under the weight of its own implausibility. A pity, because again Julia McKenzie did well as Jane Marple - though I still can’t understand quite how she managed to insinuate herself into the heart of a strange community with such effortless ease and speed.

A Pocket Full of Rye

I was quite prepared not to like Julia McKenzie’s interpretation of Miss Jane Marple (or ‘Marple’ as ITV now calls her, for some reason) but I was pleased, and maybe a little surprised, that her debut in A Pocket Full of Rye proved to be a good performance in a well-made adaptation of an enjoyable story.

The screenplay was by Kevin Elyot, who is experienced in the art of Christie adaptation, and I thought it was impressive that he handled the final revelations in a wholly unmelodramatic way. I was a huge fan of the Joan Hickson series (and Hickson is the definitive Jane Marple) but the Hickson version of this story, in which Peter Davison played the villain, ended, as I recall, with a rather over-the-top climax.

In this version, the emphasis was on Miss Marple’s fondness for Gladys, the maid who was the unwitting tool of a ruthless killer, and her determination to see justice meted out to the man who destroyed her. This reflects, properly, Christie’s attitude to crime and punishment, and her concept of Jane Marple as a wise woman and a righter of wrongs. The whodunit mystery here is quite cleverly constructed, but there is a bit more to this particular story than the puzzle.

The production was a little slow at times – 90 minutes would have been better than two hours, I think. But the acting was good, and generally avoided the tongue-in-cheek, or the hamminess that ruined some of the episodes starring Geraldine McEwan as the spinster sleuth. Helen Baxendale was good as usual, and it was nice (although sad) to see the late Wendy Richard and the late Ken Campbell playing Mr and Mrs Crump.

Final verdict – on this evidence, McKenzie may turn out to be a distinct improvement on McEwan. I’ll be watching her again.