September Books 7) A Murder Is Announced, by Agatha Christie

[nwhyte]

[Miss Marple said:] “Fifteen years ago one knew who everybody was. The Bantrys in the big house - and the Hartnells and the Price Ridleys and the Weatherbys... They were people whose fathers and mothers and grandfathers and grandmothers, or whose aunts and uncles, had lived there before them. If somebody new came to live there, they brought letters

Comments

[attimes_bracing]

This particular Agatha Christie is my absolute favourite. I very much agree on the Miss Hinchcliffe and Miss Murgatroyd front and the casting of them in the Joan Hickson version with Joan Sims as Murgatroyd was excellent. In my view it was accepted because of the social class attributed to them. However, if you look at Mrs Easterbrook, lately married to the Colonel Archibald Easterbrook, and later discovered to be a manicurist (from Brighton I think) as she is seen as a lower social class has attracts less sympathy. I thoroughly enjoyed the book.

[houseboatonstyx]

Yes, they're not only accepted in the wider community, but in the smaller social circle.

I'll raise you WWI, though: Tuppence's war buddies included a well dressed couple who even had a conjugal sort of spat during the gathering of the team.

And Angela Thirkell's Barsetshire included a lesbian couple whom Thirkell's heroine wondered how to explain to a visiting American (who disappointingly 'knew some like them in New York but never cared for them much' [qfm]). Well, disappointingly to me, though the heroine felt relieved at the lack of necessity for an explanation.

[bookzombie]

This story has a particular - even peculiar - significance for me: the Joan Hickson t.v. version (which is absolutely brilliant, by the way, and something I re-watch quite regularly) got me reading her books for the first time, and by extension got me reading detective fiction at all.

[pennski]

Last night we watched "Murder in Mesopotamia" via Netflix and really enjoyed looking at the social commentary that came with it.

My Grandma was close friends with two women who lived together. We were simultaneously told that it was normal and that we were not to ask about it.

[wwhyte]

I have a very strong memory that this was the show that Michael Wisher appeared as the person who is murdered at the end of Act 1, but I don't see him in the programme. That was great, meeting him. "You like science fiction?" he said. "Keep reading it. That's pure imagination."

It's not 100% clear to me that Miss HInchliffe and Miss Murgatroyd are a lesbian couple -- they may be just female companions. If they are a couple then maybe there's an incident towards the end of the book that should be played for more emotion.

[nwhyte]

Are you sure that wasn't Michael Keating, Vila of Blake's 7, who I do remember meeting at the stage door after a performance of "Anyone for Dennis" in about 1982?

[wwhyte]

We met Michael Wisher, as well (or I did, maybe you weren't there). Pretty certain it was this one; I remember he had a small part and we may have had to go and meet him at the interval, which matches this.

We also met Bernard Bresslaw. "I invented the Ice Warriors!" he told the other cast members, and wanting-to-be-a-writer me had to bite my tongue not to say "No, it was Brian Hayles!"

[nwhyte]

I remember Bernard Bresslaw - I'm fairly sure that he was with Michael Keating in Anyone for Dennis, which was on in Belfast in 1982, shortly after Gauda Prime Day. Though I cannot now find any record that he was in it.