The Moving Finger (1/2)

The poison pen letter is a village institution, and the one doing the rounds in this town is a masterpiece of spite. Everyone gets one. There is outrage, then a sour amusement that does not quite stick. Underneath both is a small cold thought: somebody here hates everybody, and everybody here knows it. The letters arrive at every address in town, which means the writer knows everyone's name and is not afraid to use it.

But then a letter turns up beside a suicide victim, and the joke dies. More bodies follow, each one making the correspondence look less like mischief and more like a plan. Miss Marple works through the letters and the deaths together, and the village starts to feel like a room with the lights going out one by one. It is a slow burn of suspicion, where every overheard conversation seems weighted with unspoken history. The police read the letters one way and the deaths another, and the two readings never quite meet. Everyone she talks to is hiding something small, and one of them is hiding something large.

Agatha Christie and Julia Jones wrote the script and Roy Boulting directed; the first half went out on 21 February 1985. Joan Hickson is Miss Marple, with Michael Culver as Edward Symmington, Elizabeth Counsell as Angela Symmington, Deborah Appleby as Megan Hunter, Andrew Bicknell and Sabina Franklyn as the Burtons, Richard Pearson as Mr Pye, Hilary Mason as Emily Barton, Lucy Gleeson as Robert Symmington and Stuart Mansfield as James Symmington. The Symmington household sits at the centre of it, polite on the surface and quietly furious underneath.

A village where the worst person in it is also the most ordinary. The letters keep coming, and so do the bodies. Nobody in the town can quite believe it of anyone in the town, which is precisely how the poison pen always gets away with it. It is a story about how much darkness a picturesque English village can hold, and how long it can hold it without anyone noticing.