A Caribbean Mystery

Miss Marple on holiday is Miss Marple at half power. Barbados is very nice and there is nothing in particular to knit her attention, until Major Palgrave latches onto her with his stories about the murderer he once knew. He is a bore with a photograph and a memory, and he has a habit of claiming he can recognise a killer when he sees one. But the next morning he is dead. Natural causes, everyone agrees.

Miss Marple does not agree. A retired British major dying quietly on a beautiful island would be convenient, and she has never trusted convenience. The death is ruled natural, which is precisely what makes her suspicious. She watches the resort guests the way she watches a village: the doctor, the wealthy couple, the paid companion, the hotel staff. Somewhere among them is a killer with another killing planned, and her reading of the situation is rarely wrong twice.

It is the closed-circle puzzle at its most relaxed: a beautiful place, a small cast, a killer who thinks the sunshine will cover him. The island's wild beauty cannot hide what he is doing, and Miss Marple has the patience to prove it. Every suspect has an alibi that involves the sea or the bar, which is to say no alibi at all.

Agatha Christie wrote this one, and no director is recorded in the notes. Joan Hickson is Miss Marple, with Donald Pleasence as Jason Rafiel, Frank Middlemass as Major Palgrave, T.P. McKenna as Dr Grahame, Robert Swan and Sue Lloyd as the Dysons, Barbara Barnes as Esther Walters, Stephen Bent as Jackson, Joseph Mydell as Inspector Weston and Valerie Buchanan as Victoria. It went out on Christmas Day 1989.

A holiday for everyone except the murderer. Miss Marple works it out politely, and the island goes back to being exactly as lovely as the brochure promised. There is something quietly funny about watching the village's best detective set loose in the tropics, where the rules are the same and the costumes are not.