Miss Marple Theme | WDR Funkhausorchester

https://youtube.com/watch?v=PqoMib8YJPA

#MissMarple #RonGoodwin #Music

Murder at the Grand Alpine Hotel: a Miss Marple Mystery by Lucy Foley (ARC review)

I’d never read any of Lucy Foley’s other work, and requested this ARC from Netgalley (and publisher Harper Collins UK) simply because of the Agatha Christie branding and my curiosity to see what a contemporary author might do with Miss Marple.

It’s 1950 (ish?) and Miss Marple is accompanying her friend Mrs Bantry to a swish Swiss hotel. It seems unlikely that two elderly ladies would make such a trip in the middle of winter—it’s hardly going to be good for their rheumatism, is it? But still, that’s the set-up, and Mrs Bantry has a paid companion to take care of things, a young woman called Diana Glass.

At the hotel, they encounter a cast of characters, including a young war hero Tory MP and his wife, a Hollywood actress, some nuns, an old wartime friend of the MP, and various other sorts who may be background characters or something more sinister.

Diana Glass is one of the main point of view characters, and narrates a lot of chapters from her position as a sort-of outsider. Not really wealthy enough to mix with this crowd, younger than her travelling companions, and carrying some sadness inside her. Other narrators include the MP’s wife Catherine Narracott, Sylvia Sinclair, the actress, and Bruno Crane—the MP’s brother-in-arms from the War.

There are four privileged viewpoints, though I feel like adding that Diana Glass’s chapters do tend to be longer than the others. Miss Marple, as she tends to do (e.g. in A Pocket Full of Rye), is mainly there in the background until she does her thing.

I found the first half of this a bit of a drag. I would say it picks up around the 80% mark, and then it rolls easily to its conclusion fairly entertainingly. Part of the drag is that I don’t think the multiple narrators technique really works here. There are stylistic differences, so you can just about tell the difference between them as you’re reading, but I kept coming back to that narratology question: who narrates, and from where?

I just wasn’t entirely convinced.

As to the Marple element, it felt that Miss Marple was phoning in her lines from other novels, or from the many television adaptations there have been. As a radio aficionado, I of course kept hearing June Whitfield’s voice.

As to the murder mystery, I did guess that one of the characters wasn’t what they seemed to be, and I also guessed what they really were. As to the rest of it, it was quite clever, but it didn’t quite gel for me. It felt sketchy and distant at times, and I never quite engaged with it—until the last 20% or so, at least. And at least there is a murder at the Grand Alpine Hotel, which is more than we could say about my previous ARC.

[I should also add that the Kindle version of the ARC that I was reading had a missing chapter heading at a crucial point. A point which made the Marple solution to the mystery seem more confused than it was. I checked the PDF version in the Netgalley app, and the heading was there, so it was just in the Kindle edition, which is a shame. I went back and forth several times, trying to identify the precise point at which a different POV character would intervene.]

Did you know that Joan Hickson was 78 when she started the BBC Miss Marple series in the 1980s? Carried on with them until she was 86.

That's impressive!

#MissMarple #JoanHickson #BBC

I love the Miss Marple theme music, and the background is so soothing. Just love it.

#murdermystery #mysteries #agathachristie #missmarple #musiclove

https://open.substack.com/pub/peteronfilm/p/cult-classics-revisited-the-mirror?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=5zer1h

My essay on a campy - if ridiculous - take on Agatha Christie's The Mirror Crack'd with a pre-Jessica Fletcher as Miss Marple
#agathachristie #missmarple #angelalansbury

Murderously good time!

Thank you @SesameSquirrel and the whole gaggle!

#TVMysteries #MissMarple