The Murder at the Vicarage

Colonel Protheroe has a talent for being disliked. He is a civil magistrate who throws his weight around a village that does not care for his kind, so when he turns up shot in the vicar's study, the parish is shocked and not entirely sorry. Death has come to St Mary Mead's most respectable room, and no one can quite believe it.

Detective Inspector Slack arrives ready to take charge and quickly discovers that being in charge here means being out of his depth. Two people confess to the shooting and both of them are lying, which gives him a full list of suspects and no way to rank them. The enquiry grows messier by the hour, a fog of accusations and half-remembered movements. It falls to Miss Marple, who has been watching the village the way she always does, to point him at the parts he has stepped over.

But the vicarage belongs to the Reverend Leonard Clement, which puts him and his wife Griselda at the centre of the mess whether they like it or not. Around them the usual village machinery grinds: the Protheroe household with Ann and Lettice, the painter Lawrence Redding, Christopher Hawes, Mrs Lestrange, Dr Haydock. Everyone has an alibi, and the alibis contradict one another cheerfully.

T.R. Bowen wrote the adaptation alongside Agatha Christie, Julian Amyes directed, and it went out on Christmas Day 1986. Joan Hickson is Miss Marple, with Paul Eddington as the vicar, Cheryl Campbell as Griselda, Robert Lang as Colonel Protheroe, Polly Adams as Ann, Tara MacGowran as Lettice, James Hazeldine as Lawrence Redding, Christopher Good as Christopher Hawes, Norma West as Mrs Lestrange and Michael Browning as Dr Haydock.

It is the village mystery in its purest form: a body nobody is sorry about, a murderer nobody can see, and two false confessions muddying the water. Miss Marple sorts it out without leaving her chair much, and that is the whole pleasure of the thing.