Two reviewers at the time the novel was published said that Agatha Christie was returning to the top of her form.[4][5] A critic writing in 1990 judged this plot to be standard fare for any writer who travels to the Caribbean and needs double duty out of a vacation.[6]
Two of the major characters reappear in the novel Nemesis, published in 1971. Jason Rafiel reappears posthumously, and his assistant Esther Walters assists Miss Marple in the early chapters of the subsequent story.
Plot summary
This story takes place at the Golden Palm resort on the Caribbean island of St Honoré. Miss Marple's nephew has paid for her to holiday there after a bout of ill health. She speaks with Major Palgrave, a well-travelled man with many stories to share. She sits, half listening, until Palgrave tells a story about a man who got away with murder more than once. When Palgrave asks her if she wants to see a picture of a murderer, she listens intently – but after he finds the snapshot in his wallet, he suddenly changes the subject. Miss Marple looks up to see why and spots several people nearby.
The next day, when the maid Victoria finds Major Palgrave dead in his room, Miss Marple is convinced he was murdered. She asks Dr Graham to find the photo he mentioned, pretending it is of her nephew, but it is not found. Meanwhile, she interviews the others: Tim and Molly Kendal, owners of the hotel; the Prescotts, a clergyman and his sister; Mr Jason Rafiel, a tycoon confined to a wheelchair; Jackson, his nurse/masseur/attendant/valet; Esther Walters, his secretary; the American Lucky Dyson and her husband, Greg; and Edward and Evelyn Hillingdon. On the beach, Miss Marple sees Señora de Caspearo, a woman on holiday who says she remembers Major Palgrave because he had an 'evil eye'. Miss Marple corrects her that he had a glass eye, but the Señora still says that it was evil.
Victoria informs the Kendals that she did not remember seeing the high blood pressure medication, Serenite, in Major Palgrave's room before his death, although it was found on his table after his death. That night, Victoria is found stabbed to death. Molly begins having nightmares. Miss Marple finds Jackson looking at Molly's cosmetics; he says that if belladonna were added to one of them, it would cause nightmares. The following night, Tim finds Molly unconscious on the floor, apparently having taken an overdose of sleeping pills. The police are involved, and the cook, Enrico, tells them he saw Molly holding a steak knife before going outside. Miss Marple asks the others if Major Palgrave told people about the photo. Others claim Palgrave said it was not a photo of a wife killer but a husband killer. When police realize that the high blood pressure medicine did not belong to Major Palgrave, his body is exhumed and the autopsy reveals that he died by poison, as Miss Marple expected.
At night, Miss Marple is woken by the sounds of a search party. She is told that Tim woke up to find his wife missing. They find what seems to be her body in a creek, but it turns out to be Lucky; the two women resemble one another.
Miss Marple abruptly realises who the major saw that night when he recognised the person in the snapshot as someone on the island. She wakes Mr Rafiel and Jackson, calling herself Nemesis, and they go to the Kendals' house. There they find Tim offering Molly a drink. Miss Marple tells Jackson to take the glass away. She says there is a deadly narcotic in it. While Jackson holds Tim down, She explains that Tim is the wife killer recognised by Major Palgrave. Miss Marple had thought Palgrave saw the Hillingdons and the Dysons over her right shoulder as they were coming up the beach, but had just realised that he had a glass eye on the left, so he could not have seen them. Tim and Molly were sitting on her left. Further, the story that the major told Miss Marple of the husband serially killing his wives and not getting caught was the story of Tim Kendal. Tim was planning to kill Molly soon, and so had to kill Major Palgrave when he recognised Tim. He also killed Victoria, who remembered the Serenite being in the wrong room. Tim put belladonna in Molly's cosmetics to make her appear mad to the others. Tim had asked his wife to meet him by the creek, but Molly had been distracted by a vision due to the belladonna and wandered off. Tim saw Lucky and mistook her for Molly in the darkness. He was about to poison Molly when Miss Marple interrupted him.
Esther Walters suddenly insists that Tim is not a killer. Tim shouts at her to keep quiet. He had been planning to marry Esther, after Molly's death, because he had heard that she was going to inherit a large sum of money from Jason Rafiel.
Mr Rafiel chooses to invest some money in Molly when she takes on running the Golden Palm resort herself. Miss Marple takes her flight home to England after her holiday in the tropical warmth.
Characters
Miss Marple: An elderly spinster detective with an eye for detail and unexpected clues, with a "mind like a sink". She is sent on a Caribbean holiday by her nephew.
Major Palgrave: An elderly, garrulous man with a glass eye who tells stories from past, some of which stories have photographs or news clips to illustrate them.
Tim Kendal: A man in his thirties married to Molly Kendal, who marries her using false references and starts the hotel with her, using her money.
Molly Kendal: Tim's pretty young wife who starts the hotel where the story takes place with him. She eventually believes she has fallen mentally ill and confides it to Evelyn, although her symptoms are the result of being poisoned.
Jason Rafiel: A cantankerous old man with a large fortune and an unexpectedly kind spirit, who takes a shine to Miss Marple.
Esther Walters: Jason Rafiel's secretary, (the widow of a poor provider) with a child at school in England.
Victoria: A St Honoré native who is the one to discover Major Palgrave's death and the mysterious bottle of Serenite. She has a common-law marriage with two children and is the second victim to be killed.
Greg Dyson: A nature lover, who is now married to Lucky, his second wife.
Lucky Dyson: An attractive American woman who is married to Greg. She had plotted to kill his first wife, along with Edward Hillingdon, whom she tricked into guilt for his actions, and then seduced. She is the third murder victim.
Edward Hillingdon: The husband of Evelyn and an avid nature lover. He has children at a boarding school and has an affair with Lucky.
Evelyn Hillingdon: A woman who does not love her husband Edward but stays with him both for their public image and for their children.
Señora de Caspearo: A South American woman on holiday who opposes ugliness and, therefore Major Palgrave and Jason Rafiel. She remarks on Major Palgrave's glass eye as an evil eye.
Joan Prescott: An elderly woman who enjoys gossiping and has come on holiday with her brother, Canon Prescott.
Jeremy Prescott: Miss Prescott's brother, a member of the clergy, who dislikes his sister's gossiping.
Dr Graham: The St Honoré doctor, slowly retiring from practice, who treats Miss Marple who pretends to be ill, cares for Molly and confirms the deaths of the murdered people.
Jackson: Mr Rafiel's valet/masseur/attendant who (by admission to Miss Marple) worked at a cosmetic company.
Literary significance and reception
After lukewarm reviews of her two previous novels, Francis Iles (Anthony Berkeley Cox) felt that the writer was back on form in his review in The Guardian's issue of 11 December 1964: "Mrs Agatha Christie has done it again. In A Caribbean Mystery she tells the reader explicitly what is going to happen; and yet when it does, nine out of ten will be taken completely by surprise– as I was. How does she do it? For the rest, it is Miss Marple this time who is in charge of the story; and all one can guess is that the setting is a Caribbean island."[4]
Maurice Richardson in The Observer of 15 November 1964 began, "A most encouraging return to somewhere very near her best unputdownable form. ... Suspicion nicely distributed among guests, many of them raffish adulterers. Not very hard to guess, but quite suspenseful. Good varied characterisation including a particularly excellent octogenarian tycoon."[7] Towards the end of the year, Richardson again commented on the book in a special Books of the Year: A Personal Choice column when he said, "Agatha Christie makes one of those gratifying veteran's comebacks."[5]
The Daily Mirror of 21 November 1964 wrote: "Not quite at the top of her form. A Miss Marples (sic) story which addicts won't find as unsolvable as usual."[8]
Robert Barnard said of this novel, that it was "In the tradition of all those package-tour mysteries written by indigent crime writers who have to capitalize on their meagre holidays. Nothing much of interest, but useful for illustrating the 'fluffification' of Miss Marple. Reuses a ploy from Appointment with Death."[6]
"There is no more cunning player of the murder game than Agatha Christie."— Sunday Times[9]
"Throws off the false clues and misleading events as only a master of the art can do." — The New York Times[9]
Dedication
The novel is dedicated to John Cruikshank Rose, "with happy memories of my visit to the West Indies". Christie and her husband Max Mallowan became friends with John Rose in 1928 at the archaeological site at Ur. He was the architectural draftsman and when Max was in charge of the dig in Greater Syria at Tell Arpachiyah, Iraq in 1932, he hired Rose to be his draftsman. Rose was Scottish, and as Christie described him, "a beautiful draughtsman, with a quiet way of talking, and a gentle humour that I found irresistible."[10][11]
References in other works
The millionaire Jason Rafiel appears again, posthumously, in the novel Nemesis where he sends Miss Marple on a case specifically because of her success in solving the events related in A Caribbean Mystery.
A BBC TV adaptation starring Joan Hickson was shown in 1989 as part of the series Agatha Christie's Miss Marple, with Donald Pleasence co-starring as Mr Rafiel. Few changes were made from the novel: the Prescotts and Señora de Caspearo were omitted, Miss Marple holidayed on Barbados rather than the fictional island of "St Honoré" (the name Honoré reappears as the fictional main town in the BBC series Death in Paradise that began airing in 2011), and the blood pressure medication was renamed Tetrauwolfide. The production was made and aired after the production of Nemesis (1987) leading to some viewer confusion, because Rafiel is dead at the commencement of the latter story.
In the earlier production, the part of Jason Rafiel was portrayed by Frank Gatliff, rather than Donald Pleasence. The 1989 version is the only adaptation as of 2017 to be filmed in the Caribbean, specifically on location on the island of Barbados; the 1983 TV movie was shot in California, while the 2013 version was filmed in Cape Town.
When this film was digitally restored in the mid-2010s, a number of additional and extended scenes were revealed that were not present in the original broadcast cut of the episode.
In 2013, the book was adapted for the sixth series of ITV's Agatha Christie's Marple, starring Julia McKenzie as Miss Marple and co-starring Antony Sher as Jason Rafiel, Oliver Ford Davies as Major Palgrave, Hermione Norris as Evelyn Hillingdon and Robert Webb and Charity Wakefield as the Kendalls.[14] The characters are much the same as in the novel, and the location is the same. At the end, Tim tries to shoot Molly rather than poison her, but the gun's bullets have been replaced with blanks.[15] Like other episodes in the previous series, it includes characters based on real persons. One is fledgling novelist Ian Fleming, who needs a name for his spy hero. The other is ornithologist James Bond (Charlie Higson), who begins a lecture to his fellow guests by introducing himself as "...Bond, James Bond", which solves Fleming's problem. (Fleming, who was an avid bird-watcher, did take the name from the ornithologist, though they had not met.)
As with the Joan Hickson versions, A Caribbean Mystery was adapted after Nemesis, despite the books' publication order. Nemesis was adapted in Season 3, Episode 4 airing on 1 January 2009 in the UK,[16] while A Caribbean Mystery was aired as Season 6 Episode 1, airing 16 June 2013 in the UK, over 4 years later.[14] US release was on 16 September 2014. This led to some continuity issues: in the 2009 version of Nemesis, Jason Rafiel is a German writer, but in A Caribbean Mystery (2013), he is an English chemical manufacturer. Miss Marple does not refer to herself as Nemesis at any time in this adaptation, despite herself and Mr Rafiel associating the name Nemesis with her in both novels. Just like in the Joan Hickson versions, Mr Rafiel is portrayed by different actors: Antony Sher portrays him here, but in Nemesis, he makes voice appearances by Herbert Lom (who previously appeared in the 2004 version of The Murder at the Vicarage as Monsieur Dufosse).
Michael Bakewell wrote a BBC Radio adaptation first broadcast in October 1997, with June Whitfield as Miss Marple. Señora de Caspearo is omitted but the plot of the novel is generally retained.
Publication history
1964, Collins Crime Club (London), 16 November 1964, Hardcover, 256 pp
1965, Dodd Mead and Company (New York), Hardcover, 245 pp
1966, Fontana Books (Imprint of HarperCollins), Paperback, 157 pp
The novel was serialised in the Star Weekly Novel, a Toronto newspaper supplement, in two abridged instalments from 16 to 23 January 1965, with each issue containing an uncredited cover illustration.
Related Research Articles
Miss Jane Marple is a fictional character in Agatha Christie's crime novels and short stories. Miss Marple lives in the village of St. Mary Mead and acts as an amateur consulting detective. Often characterized as an elderly spinster, she is one of Christie's best-known characters and has been portrayed numerous times on screen. Her first appearance was in a short story published in The Royal Magazine in December 1927, "The Tuesday Night Club", which later became the first chapter of The Thirteen Problems (1932). Her first appearance in a full-length novel was in The Murder at the Vicarage in 1930, and her last appearance was in Sleeping Murder in 1976.
Sleeping Murder: Miss Marple's Last Case is a work of detective fiction by Agatha Christie and first published in the UK by the Collins Crime Club in October 1976 and in the US by Dodd, Mead and Company later in the same year. The UK edition retailed for £3.50 and the US edition for $7.95.
The Mirror Crack'd from Side to Side, a novel by Agatha Christie, was published in the UK in 1962 and a year later in the US under the title The Mirror Crack'd. The story features amateur detective Miss Marple solving a mystery in St. Mary Mead.
St Mary Mead is a fictional village created by popular crime fiction author Dame Agatha Christie.
Joan Bogle Hickson, OBE was an English actress of theatre, film and television. She was known for her role as Agatha Christie's Miss Marple in the television series Miss Marple. She also narrated a number of Miss Marple stories on audiobooks.
At Bertram's Hotel is a work of detective fiction by Agatha Christie and first published in the UK by the Collins Crime Club on 15 November 1965 and in the US by Dodd, Mead and Company the following year. The UK edition retailed at sixteen shillings (16/-) and the US edition at $4.50. It features the detective Miss Marple staying at an upmarket hotel which is at the centre of a mysterious disappearance.
The Moving Finger is a detective novel by British writer Agatha Christie, first published in the USA by Dodd, Mead and Company in July 1942 and in the UK by the Collins Crime Club in June 1943. The US edition retailed at $2.00 and the UK edition at seven shillings and sixpence.
The Mirror Crack'd is a 1980 British mystery film directed by Guy Hamilton from a screenplay by Jonathan Hales and Barry Sandler, based on Agatha Christie's Miss Marple novel The Mirror Crack'd from Side to Side (1962). It stars Angela Lansbury, Geraldine Chaplin, Tony Curtis, Edward Fox, Rock Hudson, Kim Novak, and Elizabeth Taylor. Scenes were filmed at Twickenham Film Studios in Twickenham, London, and on location in Kent.
The Murder at the Vicarage is a work of detective fiction by British writer Agatha Christie, first published in the UK by the Collins Crime Club in October 1930 and in the US by Dodd, Mead and Company later in the same year. The UK edition retailed at seven shillings and sixpence and the US edition at $2.00.
The Sittaford Mystery is a work of detective fiction by British writer Agatha Christie, first published in the US by Dodd, Mead and Company in 1931 under the title of The Murder at Hazelmoor and in UK by the Collins Crime Club on 7 September of the same year under Christie's original title. It is the first Christie novel to be given a different title for the US market. The US edition retailed at $2.00 and the UK edition at seven shillings and sixpence (7/6).
The Body in the Library is a work of detective fiction by Agatha Christie and first published in the US by Dodd, Mead and Company in February 1942 and in the UK by the Collins Crime Club in May of the same year. The US edition retailed at $2.00 and the UK edition at seven shillings and sixpence. The novel features her fictional amateur detective Miss Marple.
A Murder Is Announced is a work of detective fiction by Agatha Christie, first published in the UK by the Collins Crime Club in June 1950 and in the US by Dodd, Mead and Company in the same month. The UK edition sold for eight shillings and sixpence (8/6) and the US edition at $2.50.
Nemesis is a work of detective fiction by Agatha Christie (1890–1976) and first published in the UK by the Collins Crime Club in November 1971 and in the US by Dodd, Mead and Company later in the same year. The UK edition retailed at £1.50 and the US edition at $6.95. It was the last Miss Marple novel the author wrote, although Sleeping Murder was the last Miss Marple novel to be published.
Three Blind Mice and Other Stories is a collection of short stories written by Agatha Christie, first published in the US by Dodd, Mead and Company in 1950. The first edition retailed at $2.50.
Agatha Christie's Marple is a British ITV television programme loosely based on the books and short stories by British crime novelist Agatha Christie. The title character was played by Geraldine McEwan from the first to the third series, until her retirement from the role, and by Julia McKenzie from the fourth series onwards. Unlike the counterpart TV series Agatha Christie's Poirot, the show took many liberties with Christie’s works, most notably adding Miss Marple’s character to the adaptations of novels in which she never appeared. Following the conclusion of the sixth series, the BBC acquired the rights for the production of Agatha Christie adaptations, suggesting that ITV would be unable to make a seventh series of Marple.
Miss Marple, titled Agatha Christie's Miss Marple in the series, is a British television series based on the Miss Marple murder mystery novels by Agatha Christie, starring Joan Hickson in the title role. It aired from 26 December 1984 to 27 December 1992 on BBC1. All twelve original Miss Marple novels by Christie were dramatised.
In Agatha Christie's mystery novels, several characters cross over different sagas, creating a fictional universe in which most of her stories are set. This article has one table to summarize the novels with characters who occur in other Christie novels; the table is titled Crossovers by Christie. There is brief mention of characters crossing over in adaptations of the novels. Her publications, both novels and short stories, are then listed by main detective, in order of publication. Some stories or novels authorised by the estate of Agatha Christie, using the characters she created, and written long after Agatha Christie died, are included in the lists.
Lists of adaptations of the works of Agatha Christie:
Raymond West is a fictional character who appears or is mentioned in several of Agatha Christie's novels and short stories featuring Jane Marple.
A Caribbean Mystery is a 1983 American made-for-television mystery film based on the 1964 Agatha Christie novel A Caribbean Mystery and starring Helen Hayes as Miss Marple.
References
1 2 Peers, Chris; Spurrier, Ralph; Sturgeon, Jamie; Foord, Peter; Williams, Richard (March 1999). Collins Crime Club – A checklist of First Editions (Seconded.). Dragonby Press. p.15. ISBN978-1871122138.
↑ Cooper, John; Pyke, B A (1994). Detective Fiction – the collector's guide (Seconded.). Scholar Press. pp.82, 87. ISBN0-85967-991-8.
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