1993 audio adaptation of Christie's 1961 mystery, in 90 minutes.
People seem to be dying very… conveniently; do the village witches
of Much Deeping have anything to do with it?
The novel is around 64,000 words, which read at a standard
speaking rate would take about six hours, so some three-quarters of it
must have been trimmed to make this. And yet all the bits I remember,
having not read it for some years, are there: for example, Poppy
saying "but there aren't any witches nowadays", the greasy lawyer
saying "I'm a lawyer myself - disbarred, of course", and his argument
that it would be bad taste to place a bet that someone one knew
would die.
It helps that this isn't one of the "experimental" Christies, one
where it turns out that nobody did it, or everybody did it, or the
narrator did it; there's a problem to be solved with straightforward
evaluation of evidence, not by playing tricks with the narrative.
Adaptation and audio production are solid, with no flashiness also but
nothing to distract from the story: it's a decent period piece that
cleaves closely to the original.
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