1999 audio adaptation of Christie's 1942 mystery, in one 90-minute
episode. The blonde dressed for a party turns up, stone dead, on the
floor of the library at Gossington Hall…
Everyone suspects the terribly fast young man who has Girls down
for the weekend, but of course it's not that simple. This is a fairly
decent mystery, the second full-length Miss Marple story, and she's
well-served here by June Whitfield, carefully blending nice old lady
and cunning student of human nature: it's a hard mixture to get right,
and she does.
"Her hair was… unnaturally fair."
The younger female voices in particular tend to blend into each other,
which matters on a few occasions, but otherwise this is a decent
production that doesn't try to add much if anything to the basic
story. Perhaps it should; there's a strong strain of "the conventional
approach to life is Right and lower-class people should Know Their
Place" which gets quite tedious at times. The story tries to modify
what was already a detective-story cliché, by having an unusual body
in an entirely normal library; but at this remove, of course, it has
itself become the cliché.
It has a few good moments but it's probably not worth going to any
trouble to track down.
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