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Sure enough, the same thing happened, with a hollyhock on the wallpaper changing colour, although the door was locked. Another month passed, with Nurse Copling and Pritchard growing increasingly nervous while Mrs Pritchard seems resigned. The morning after the next full moon, Mrs Pritchard was found dead in her bed, her smelling salts beside her, a faint smell of gas in the room and a geranium on the wallpaper turned blue.
There was gossip following the death and an exhumation, but no clear result. Moreover, Zarida had disappeared and no one could properly trace how Mrs Pritchard had come to hear of her. Once again Miss Marple has the solution. Having once seen a gardener mixing potassium cyanide with water to kill wasps , she was struck by how closely the solution resembled smelling salts. If such a solution had been substituted for the bottle Mrs Pritchard always kept by her, the cyanide would have killed her, but the gas would have covered the short-lived smell of almonds.
The flowers on the wall were red litmus paper which the ammonia — as an alkaloid — in the true smelling salts turned blue. Nurse Copling, who was Zarida in disguise, was the killer, in the hopes which did not come to pass of marrying the widower Pritchard. Sir Henry confirms that Nurse Copling was recently arrested for a similar murder. Dr Lloyd is called upon to tell his story, and it begins in Las Palmas on the island of Gran Canaria.
The doctor was living there for his health, and one night, in the principal hotel of the town, he caught sight of two middle-aged ladies, one slightly plump, one somewhat scraggy, whom he found out from a perusal of the hotel register were called Miss Mary Barton and Miss Amy Durrant, and who were tourists from England. The very next day, Dr Lloyd travelled to the other side of the island with friends for a picnic and, reaching the bay of Las Nieves, the group came upon the end of a tragedy: Miss Durrant had been swimming and got into trouble, and Miss Barton swam out to help her but to no avail; the other woman drowned.
As part of the ensuing investigation, Miss Barton revealed that Miss Durrant was her companion of some five months. Dr Lloyd was puzzled by the claim made by one of the witnesses who swore that she saw Miss Barton holding Miss Durant's head under the water, not helping her, but the claim was dismissed as none of the other witnesses backed up the story. Dr Lloyd helped Miss Barton attempt to trace next-of-kin, but without success, and he also helped arrange the funeral, which took place on the island.
Before she left Gran Canaria ten days later, Miss Barton asked Dr Lloyd several strange questions regarding the justification of taking the law into one's own hands. Miss Marple is interested to know if Miss Barton suddenly put on weight during this period and the doctor confirms that she had done so. Some time later, Dr Lloyd read in the papers that Miss Barton drowned in Cornwall, although the body was never found. She left a suicide note which seemed to confess to some crime, and the inquest ruled that she was temporarily insane.
The Thumb Mark of St Peter: Petherick confirms that Philip confessed as much in a guarded conversation they had had a month later. It was thought that he had died after eating poisoned mushrooms. You are commenting using your WordPress. The various guests consider the case and come up with several suggestions, but none that fully explain all of the facts. She was on tour in a provincial town when she was summoned to a police station. This book is not yet featured on Listopia.
Miss Marple, comparing the tale to that of a local fraudster called Mrs Trout, who claimed several dead people's old age pensions, states that "Miss Barton" was a clever criminal who drowned the other woman and then assumed her identity — hence the reason she looked fat — she was simply wearing the other person's clothes. The really significant fact was that the body in Cornwall was never found — this was another part of the deception.
Dr Lloyd confirms that he met the lady again coincidentally in Melbourne , Australia. Miss Barton was , in fact, Miss Durrant. Two tourists would not have been known to anyone, and no one realised who was the employer and who was the companion in Gran Canaria. The two women were cousins. Miss Durrant was the eldest of nine children in desperate straits, with some suffering ill-health. They wrote to their relative in England for help, but she refused due to a family quarrel from years earlier.
Miss Durrant travelled to England under this assumed name and found employment with Miss Barton, whom she then killed and whose guise she adopted in Gran Canaria. Faking her death in Cornwall, she and her siblings inherited her money as next-of-kin. Dr Lloyd met with the Durrant family and realised the harm he would cause them by reporting their elder sister to the police for a crime for which he had little evidence. Six months later, Miss Durrant died. Sir Henry Clithering tells his story, still a puzzle to him. There are four suspects, three of whom are therefore as much victims as the real victim in that they are under constant suspicion.
It concerns a German secret society, the Schwartze Hand , started after the war, with methods and objectives similar to those of the Camorra. Dr Rosen, prominent in secret service work, penetrated the organisation and managed to bring about its downfall.
Despite this success, he was a marked man and came to England, living in a cottage in Somerset , expecting he might be murdered. His household comprised his niece Greta, an old servant named Gertrud, a local gardener called Dobbs, and Dr Rosen's secretary, Charles Templeton, whom Clithering reveals was one of his own men, put in the house to keep an eye on things but possibly not totally above suspicion.
The tragedy occurred when Dr Rosen was found at the bottom of the stairs, possibly having fallen down, possibly having been pushed. The four people in the locked house were out at the time, but none can produce an alibi for the time of the death. In addition, no strangers were seen in the vicinity, where they would easily have stood out and been spotted, therefore one of the four must be guilty.
One puzzle is how the killer received his or her instructions. The only people to come to the house that day were the butcher, the grocer's assistant, and the postman. The latter brought several letters for various members of the house, including a gardening catalogue and a letter for Charles Templeton which appeared to have been sent from relatives in Germany. Templeton ripped it up and threw it away.
Of the letters the police were able to examine, the strangest was one addressed to Dr Rosen himself which was from someone called "Georgine" and mentioned several people of whom Rosen had never heard. Sir Henry shows the group the letter and Miss Marple wonders why the word "Honesty", which appears in the middle of a sentence, is spelt with a capital letter. Three months after the death of her uncle, Greta Rosen went back to Germany, but not before seeing Sir Henry and asking him to confirm that Charles was above suspicion.
Sir Henry was unable to do so. Miss Marple and Mrs Bantry point out that the three people in the letter and the one place name, together with the word "Honesty", are all species of dahlias and that, rearranged, they spell "Death".
This was the instruction to kill Dr Rosen, and it was sent to the intended victim himself to divert suspicion from the assassin. Receiving a letter from someone he did not know, he would naturally give it to the other people at the breakfast table to read, one being Charles, the secretary and natural suspect, but the other being his niece, the assassin. Her visit to Sir Henry to try and clear Charles's name was intended to have the opposite effect.
Miss Marple also remembers, from her childhood German governess , that "Georgine" is German for "Dahlia", and that dahlias are symbolic of "Treachery and Misrepresentation". The ladies are prevailed upon to tell a story, and Miss Marple relates a tale from a time when she was staying at Keston Spa Hydro just before Christmas.
Feeling that older and more experienced people's feelings and intuitions are too often easily dismissed when such feelings are based on facts and experience, she relates how, when she saw a couple called Jack and Gladys Sanders together, she just knew that the husband meant to murder his wife. The motive was money; they were living off her income but could not touch the capital in her lifetime, but she could will the money away and had done so in favour of her husband. Miss Marple's feelings were confirmed when she shared a tram ride with the couple and witnessed Mr Sanders "tripping" on the stairs onto his wife who then fell down, but was fortunately saved by the conductor.
The atmosphere of on-coming tragedy was heightened when the hall porter died from pneumonia , followed soon after by one of the hydro's housemaids who died of blood poisoning. Miss Marple dates the tragedy from when Mr Sanders overheard her and two other ladies talking about this latter death. His wife was out playing bridge with friends, and early in the evening Mr Sanders returned from a trip out with two of his friends and asked Miss Marple and the other ladies' opinions on an evening bag that he'd bought for his wife as a Christmas present.
They went up to his room and saw the body of Mrs Sanders on the floor, felled by a sandbag. Immediately suspicious, Miss Marple refused to allow the husband to touch the body, and insisted the door be locked and the police called. Miss Marple noticed the woman's hat was lying beside the body, although previously she had been wearing it. Prompted by the police, she also noticed that the dead woman was no longer wearing earrings, as she had been when the body was first discovered.
Mrs Sanders's other jewellery was missing, and the police were certain the thief came back after killing the woman and gained entry by means of the fire escape. Mrs Sanders had been summoned back to the hydro from her bridge game by a mysterious telephone call, but her husband had a perfect alibi for the time in question, that is after she had left the bridge game but before the discovery of the body. It took Miss Marple two days to guess the truth; she then asked the police to try the discarded hat on the dead woman's head — it didn't fit.
She realised that the body they saw and quickly locked in the room when they first discovered it was not that of Mrs Sanders, but that of the dead housemaid, which was awaiting collection by the undertakers. Sanders had put the body there when his wife was playing bridge, and then rushed into the grounds after the "discovery", supposedly overcome with grief.
There he had met his wife returning from the game, summoned by him on the telephone using an alias, somehow persuaded her up to their room by means of the fire escape, killed her, and then swapped the clothes, returning the dead housemaid to her room. The one thing he couldn't do was put the hat back on his wife's head, as her shingled hair meant it didn't fit. The cheap hat they found was the property of the housemaid, as Mrs Sanders's hat cupboard was locked when her husband was placing the dead girl in his room, and a hat was needed to cover the face.
Mr Sanders was hanged for his wife's murder. A reluctant Mrs Bantry is prevailed upon to take her turn. She relates how she and her husband were guests of Sir Ambrose Bercy at his house at Clodderham Court. Sage leaves were picked from the garden for dinner that night, but unfortunately foxglove was growing among the sage, and it was also included in the stuffing for the meal of duck. All of the people at dinner were ill but one of them — Sir Ambrose's ward, Sylvia Keene — died. The inquest heard that death was due to poisoning by digitalis. Among the party was a young man called Jerry Lorimer who was engaged to Sylvia, to the opposition of Sir Ambrose; but, after a year of the engagement , Sir Ambrose had given in.
Six months after Sylvia's death, the two were married. Dr Lloyd is puzzled as a fatal poisoning by the use of foxglove leaves — if it was an accident — is difficult to achieve; the alkaloid has to be extracted with great care and Sir Henry latches onto the main problem of the case, namely: It was Sylvia herself who picked the foxglove leaves and Dr Lloyd wonders if the intended victim was Sir Ambrose, who was prescribed drugs for his heart condition.
Miss Marple latches onto this clue and finds the solution — Sir Ambrose's drug was digitalin. He planted the foxglove seed among the sage a long time before, and mild poisoning ensued at the dinner party, but somehow he fed his ward further doses at the same time from his own drug, thereby killing her but making it look like an accident. The motive was jealousy — he was in love with his ward and determined that she wouldn't marry Lorimer. Mrs Bantry confirms that she received a letter from Sir Ambrose after he died, to be posted to her in the event of his death, in which he confessed to the crime.
Jane Helier, the beautiful but somewhat vacuous actress, is the last to tell a story. Although she attempts to disguise the fact somewhat by using a false name, the others quickly realise that the story is about herself and, slipping up several times, she soon gives up the pretence and continues. She was on tour in a provincial town when she was summoned to a police station. There had been a burglary at a bungalow and a young man called Leslie Faulkener had been arrested.
His story was that he was an unsuccessful playwright and had sent one of his efforts to Jane to read. She had written to him to say that she liked it and inviting him to come down to the bungalow to discuss it. He had gone, been shown in by the parlourmaid, met Jane, and drunk a cocktail. The next thing he knew, he was waking up by the roadside. He staggered along and was quickly picked up by the police.
The bungalow belonged to Sir Herman Cohen, a rich city gent, and in it he had installed his mistress. She was an actress called Mary Kerr, the wife of another actor, called Claude Leeson although Jane admits these are not the people's real names. Someone calling herself Miss Kerr had rung up the police, told them the bungalow had been burgled, and described Leslie Faulkener as having visited there earlier that day, but having been refused admittance. He was later seen by a maid as gaining entrance through a window to steal Miss Kerr's jewellery.
The police did indeed find the bungalow rifled and a large quantity of jewels missing. Miss Kerr soon returned but denied any knowledge of the affair or even of having rung up the police. Both she and the maid had been summoned away for the day on separate false pretexts and had never been in the bungalow when Mr Faulkener visited whether by invitation or not. When Jane was brought face to face with Faulkener at the police station, he stated that this was not the woman he met at the bungalow, and the note was proven not to be in Jane's handwriting.
Faulkener was released through lack of evidence. Sir Herman tried to hush the matter up but failed, and his wife started divorce proceedings when she found out about the affair with the actress. The guests of the Bantrys try to guess the solution but fail, and are annoyed when Jane claims she does not know the true solution herself. The group disperse for the night, their six stories told, and Miss Marple whispers something in Jane's ear that causes the actress to cry out in shock.
Later she confesses to Mrs Bantry that the story she told never happened, but Jane was thinking of carrying out such a scheme against an actress who enticed one of her previous husbands away from her. Jane and her understudy concocted the set-up. Appointment with Death Poirot. In a Glass Darkly: Problem at Pollensa Bay. The House of Lurking Death: Evil Under the Sun Poirot. The Case of the Middle-Aged Wife: The Market Basing Mystery: While the Light Lasts.
Lord Edgware Dies Poirot. The Manhood of Edward Robinson: Three Act Tragedy Poirot. The Tragedy of Marsdon Manor: The Adventure of Johnnie Waverley: The Man in the Mist: The Adventure of the Egyptian Tomb: The Sign in the Sky: The Idol House of Astarte: The King of Clubs: Problem at Pollensa Bay: Murder in the Mews: The Face of Helen: The Million Dollar Bond Robbery: The Case of the Perfect Maid: The Mystery of the Spanish Chest: The Adventure of the Clapham Cook: The Mystery of the Blue Jar: The Man from the Sea: The Case of the Rich Woman: How Does Your Garden Grow?: The Voice in the Dark: The Case of the Distressed Lady: The Case of the Discontented Soldier: The Bird with the Broken Wing: The Call of Wings: Next to a Dog: How to write a great review.
The review must be at least 50 characters long. Used to like bowling and mini golf, though. You know can we still be friends when you see what comes next …. I was far too busy reading Dostoievsky. This does sound nicely tongue in cheek, from your nicely ironic excerpts. Well I was firmly into the great classics and serious modern writing from a fairly tender age, as my mum was a stupendous reader, and I rather grew up in high culture.
Both school and Uni lagged behind in their appreciation of writing outside English literature though — European was pretty well ignored, and as for writing from other continents….. But then I was pretty leftie at that point! Yes, indeed — English authors got priority throughout my education too, with even less justification… och, aye! Well I do agree with that judging something against itself and pleasures come in many different forms. And would 5 star it because it does what it means to brilliantly. And I got great pleasure when I thought it would be a good illustration of something and found a clip.
Next week is a whole new week of flickers. I start small, then its gif ahoy! I might flicker tomorrow — just because I can! Encouraging others to talk about this embarrassing problem? A piece about tennis, the challenges of playing on different surfaces nicely illustrated by gifs of Rafa plucking at his nether region hugging shorts? And the problem is both of them have short deadlines with the publisher releasing only a couple of weeks in advance. I guess, you know, that pro reviewers probably feel like that a lot — when anything, even self- imposed gets to sometimes seem like an obligation.
TCM are running marathon film noir sessions to go along with the course. So I might — if I actually get around to doing the course — have a little series of film reviews. Part of the course is supposed to be to make us recognise noir tropes etc and discuss the films in a more educated way, so it might be fun to see whether my reviews get better — or duller!
But when I signed up for it I forgot it would be conflicting with the tennis…. Who are TCM — I automatically think only of Traditional Chinese Medicine and am surprised that the society of Acupuncturists is diversifying into film criticism. Are there many noir films involving fiendish Acupuncturists — well we know of course there is Goldfinger, cats are definitely fiendish Acupuncturists. One of mine practices regularly on the sofa…….. I shall look forward hugely to blog posts dripping with smoke, shades, French accents, black and white footage and black and white blood stains. There must be films where this combines with a tennis theme……….
I normally only watch about one film a month! However, some of the films on their schedule look quite fun. You are quite right well done the tennis. I love the original version of that……….. Of course, she wrote over 70 books, so you might have to add them all, and change your name to Cathy! Not sure anyone can ever top her. I love the Margaret Rutherford films, though they had almost nothing to do with Miss Marple except the name.
The Affair at the Bungalow has ratings and 32 reviews. Kathy said: Excellent short story. When I got to the twist at the end, I immediately re-read. The Affair at the Bungalow: A Miss Marple Short Story - Kindle edition by Agatha Christie. Download it once and read it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or.
But the Hickson versions are the best — not just because of her performance, but the whole thing — sticking close to the stories, great casting etc etc…. I am sure that I am in a minority here in having preferred the Poirot stories, but I do like the Marple stories as well. And on TV, the Marples starring Ms. Hickson might have been the better adaptations in many cases. Later on, they started changing the plots of the Marple stories for TV, and I think that they even put Miss Marple in a few stories where she originally was not!
When you sit down with an Agatha Christie short story, you know that it will be engrossing and well plotted; good old-fashioned reading pleasure. This one certainly seems to fit that description. I think David Suchet was brilliant at the Poirots too, and certainly the early ones of those stuck fairly well to the plots. I think that I have a very good memory, and yet I also very often cannot remember who the actual murderer is in a Christie story.. Maybe it is because she wrote so many mystery novels.. But I must say that now that I have read most of them at least twice, I do start to remember which is which.
One that I had never read until recently, and which was really good, on a psychological and emotional level. This was the best of those dramatizations I have heard, and a very interesting story. But yes, both The Hollow and Crooked House are excellent. In fact Crooked House is one of my favourites — she really could come up with unusual stuff and make it very believable. I always quite liked the ones that had young girls in them — she got the charcaterisation of them very well. Cat Among the Pigeons is another of the less well known ones that I love — about the boarding school?
This collection of stories, The Thirteen Problems, is available on audio with Joan Hickson reading, though one of my other commenters has just told me it might be called the Tuesday Club Murders in the US. But it just felt like a good one to revisit. All of the others were at least two episodes. That is the way to tell a good mystery; the interactions among the characters, the jealousies and suspicions, is half of the fun. And the British have such great character actors, that it is a pleasure to enjoy a leisurely paced mystery. I saw a few of the later Marples and Poirots, and the story was often so rushed that I had trouble figuring out the familial relationships at the beginning.
I loved the Dalgliesh mysteries which went four or five episodes.