1990 audio adaptation of Christie's 1931 mystery, in 5 half-hour
episodes. At a table-turning session in a near-snowbound house on the
edge of Dartmoor, the spirit claims that Captain Trevelyan has been
murdered. When the party gets down to his house later, so he has. The
fiancée of the prime suspect works to clear his name.
So it's not one of the series books, but a stand-alone murder
without recurring cast. Emily the investigator barely turns up until
the third part. The whole thing is quite slight; the book's only about
60,000 words, usual for the day, and I'm a little surprised it was
given 2½ hours of adaptation when The Pale Horse only got 1½.
Still, most of the book is here, if juggled around slightly for
convenience of not having too many voices in a scene. The key clues
are certainly present, and reasonably well-signposted; I don't
remember when I first read this or whether I solved it, though I think
that to the experienced mystery reader there's a certain style of
harping on irrelevancies which makes it apparent that this bit of
distraction is likely to be the one that conceals something valuable.
Production is decent, and effects are applied with a light hand. There
are no especially famous names, but everybody here does a decent job
without stealing the scenes – though I wish they could have found a
lead who could be trained not to swallow the "t"s at the ends of
words; this is supposed to be the 1930s, after all, and it quite
breaks my illusion that this is a well-brought-up young lady.
Nothing revolutionary, but a faithful adaptation and an enjoyable
couple of hours.
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