Miss Marple: The Body in the Library **** (1984, Joan Hickson, Gwen Watford, Moray Watson, Valentine Dyall, Jess Conrad) – Classic Movie Review 9607

Silvio Narizzano’s 1984 three-episode TV mini-series Miss Marple: The Body in the Library stars Joan Hickson, who takes on her first case as the BBC’s Miss Marple in a UK TV series that filmed all 12 original Agatha Christie Miss Marple novels. 

Director Silvio Narizzano’s 1984 three-episode TV mini-series Miss Marple: The Body in the Library stars Joan Hickson, who takes on her first case as the BBC’s Miss Marple in a UK TV series of Agatha Christie films that ran to 12 films until The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side in 1992.

Here the spinster sleuth Miss Jane Marple (Hickson) investigates in the quaint, quiet fictional English village of St Mary Mead when a young woman is found dead in the Gossington Hall library of retired Colonel Bantry (Moray Watson) and Mrs Bantry (Gwen Watford).

The production is plush, the handling is sleek and the yarn, more or less faithfully based on Agatha Christie’s novel, with just a few minor changes, is satisfying, with Hickson a brilliant Miss Marple.

Also in the cast are Andrew Cruickshank. Moray Watson, Valentine Dyall, Frederick Jaeger, Trudie Styler, Anthony Smee, David Horovitch as Detective Inspector Slack, Karin Foley, Raymond Francis, Ian Brimble, John Moffatt, Ciaran Madden, Keith Drinkel, Jess Conrad, John Bardon and Arthur Bostrom.

Jess Conrad recalls: ‘My first acting job after playing Joseph [on stage] for many years was in Miss Marple: The Body in the Library in 1984. The director Silvio Narizzano cast me as tennis coach Raymond Starr and we filmed on location in Bournemouth.’

Miss Marple: The Body in the Library is directed by Silvio Narizzano, runs 154 minutes, is made by British Broadcasting Corporation, A+E Networks and Seven Network, released by BBC, is written by T R Bowen, based on Agatha Christie’s novel, is shot by John Walker, is produced by Guy Slater, and is scored by Ken Howard and Alan Blaikley.

Joan Hickson and producer Guy Slater pictured as her casting as Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple is announced in 1984.

It premiered in three parts from 26 to 28 December 1984 on BBC One.

Miss Marple: The Moving Finger, directed by John Boulting, followed in 1985.

It was remade in 2004 by ITV, as part of Agatha Christie’s Marple series, starring Geraldine McEwan as Miss Marple, James Fox as Colonel Bantry, and Joanna Lumley as Dolly Bantry.

A radio adaptation was produced for BBC Radio 4 in 1999, with June Whitfield as Miss Marple.

The dust jacket illustration of the UK first edition.

The Body in the Library was first published in the US by Dodd, Mead and Company in February 1942 and in UK by the Collins Crime Club in May 1942.

Mrs Christie describes ‘the body in the library’ as a cliché of detective fiction, so she is going for a post-modern reworking of the genre. When writing her own variation on this theme, she decided that the library should be a completely conventional one, while the body would be a highly improbable and sensational one.

The village of St Mary Mead was first mentioned in a Miss Marple book in 1930 as the setting for the first Marple novel, The Murder at the Vicarage. But it is first mentioned in the 1928 Hercule Poirot novel The Mystery of the Blue Train. Miss Marple lives in Danemead Cottage, the last cottage in Old Pasture Lane, with a telephone number of three five on a manual exchange.

Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple, starring Joan Hickson, aired from 26 December 1984 to 27 December 1992 on BBC1. All 12 original Miss Marple Christie novels were dramatised.

© Derek Winnert 2020 Classic Movie Review 9,607

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The dust jacket illustration of the US actual first edition.