Today’s 90-minute Miss Marple mystery, via the BBC, was The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side, which is much more like it. There were clues when and where they were supposed to be, interesting and sympathetic characters, and even a bit of things going less-than-smoothly for Miss Marple.
Miss Marple’s friends sell the house of The Body in the Library to a film star named Marina Gregg and her husband. A raving fan girl is poisoned at an open house for the neighborhood, and it appears that Ms. Gregg was the actual target. Miss Marple isn’t there, because she’d been ill and her off-screen nephew Raymond has saddled her with an appalling nurse, but she hears all about it from various people, including another nephew, an Inspector from Scotland Yard. She solves the mystery with a refreshing lack of reminiscences about other people she’s known, among quite a quantity of red herrings.
As I said, this was quite a satisfactory adaptation; the only problem, which is not limited to this production, is that when British actors attempt to do American accents—well, I’ve yet to hear one that doesn’t make my ears itch. I have a great deal more sympathy, these days, for U.K. natives who complain about the accents of American actors.