They Do It with Mirrors

An estate turned reformatory school is an odd place for a reunion, but that is where Miss Marple finds her old school friend Carrie-Louise Serrocold living. The visit is barely underway before Carrie-Louise's stepson is killed, and the manor, already full of troubled boys and older grievances, becomes a house where everyone is a suspect. There are, the write-ups insist, literally hundreds of suspects. It is not far off.

But the family running the place is not a happy one. That is putting it mildly. Each of them has a reason to wish the dead man gone, and the reformatory staff and pupils add their own resentments to the pile. The suspicion spreads the way gossip does in a closed institution: everyone has heard something, nobody knows anything. Every alibi rests on another member of the family, which makes the alibis worth exactly what they look worth. Miss Marple, who has always preferred to sit and watch, moves through the house collecting the one set of lies that does not fit with the rest.

The reformatory element gives the mystery its strange flavour: a house full of boys being given a second chance, and a family that seems to have used up its own. Agatha Christie's novel provides the plot, and the film aired on 29 December 1991, with no director listed in the credits. Joan Hickson is Miss Marple and Jean Simmons is Carrie-Louise, two old schoolmates meeting again in the strangest possible circumstances.

There is no chase and no gunplay. Just a very large house with a very crowded suspect list, and a small elderly woman who notices what nobody else does. She works from a rocking chair what the police would need a squad for, and she does it without raising her voice. The answer, when it comes, is the sort you can only reach by sitting still and paying attention. That is the whole appeal of this one.