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- [00:02]
A
This is a Headgun podcast.
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This episode is brought to you by Mint Mobile. Andrew now that the holidays are over, you or I or anyone might be feeling like you've got a big spending hangover. The drinks, the holiday food, the gifts, it all adds up. Luckily, Mint Mobile is here to help you cut back on overspending on wireless this January, which with 50% off unlimited premium wireless.
- [00:30]
A
Craig Mint Mobile's end of year sale is still going on, but only until the end of the month. You can cut out Big Wireless's bloated plans and unnecessary monthly charges with 50% off 3, 6 or 12 months of unlimited. Craig the truth is, I switched to Mint Mobile years before they became an advertiser and I'm doing it for the same reason. Why I'm telling you and all the listeners to switch is because it's basically the same service I had before, but for way cheaper. And that's all you need to know. Like I don't. I don't. I could keep going, but I won't.
- [00:59]
B
So this January, quit overspending on Wireless with 50% off unlimited premium wireless plans start at $15 a month at mintmobile.com overdue that's mintmobile.com overdue limited time offer upfront payment of $45 for three months, $90 for six months, $180 for 12 month plan required $15 month equivalent tax and fees Extra initial plan term only greater than 50 gigabytes may slow when network is busy. Cable device required availability speed and coverage VAR mobile.com this episode is brought to you by Marley Spoon. Andrew Meal planning is hard.
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A
Don't I know it.
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Every new year I say I will get better at it. But life gets busy and next thing you know, I'm back to ordering takeout.
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A
I'm always saying this to you is Craig, you're back to ordering takeout again.
- [01:49]
B
I know. But actually I have found something that's working for me, Andrew, and that is Marley Spoon. For those nights when you need dinner like yesterday, Marley Spoon's prepared meals are exactly what they sound like. Convenient, delicious and on the table in minutes. I've used Marley Spoon a lot. My favorite recent meal that I've made was there's Za' atar roasted salmon. Came with some veggies for a nice feta salad.
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Andrew Feta salad.
- [02:17]
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This new year, fast track your way to eating well with Marley spoon. Head to marleyspoon.com offer overdue for 45% off your first order and free delivery. That's 45% off your first order and Free delivery. That's marleyspoon.com offer overdue Marley Spoon meals reimagined for real life. While Andrew and Craig believe the joy of discovery is crucial to enjoying any well told tale, they will not shy.
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Away from spoiling specific story beats when necessary.
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Plus, these are books you should have read by now. Hey everybody. Welcome to Overdue. It's a podcast about the books you've been meaning to read. My name is Craig.
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My name is Andrew.
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Agatha Christie made up a murder that no one could guess who did it.
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A
Is that Eleanor Rigby? That's good. That's funny. You have to pay Paul McCartney though. He's going to get mad. He's gonna email us again. He's gonna be able to go, hey blokes, you use my song in your podcast again?
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Locked in a room with some guy who should be in a tube.
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A
Did you write a whole thing? Like, did you?
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No, I'm doing. I was wandering around the house going, Agatha Christie and I, I got as far as made up a crime that no one could guess and I said, I'll hit record and see what else. We'll see what else comes out. I don't.
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A
Here we are.
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The spirit.
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A
Sometimes you, sometimes you write a whole prepared thing.
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B
No, I, I know, I know.
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A
Like, like, makes me feel like I came to a book report not having done the assignment.
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B
Well, it's just how I, sometimes it's how I manage my pre show jitters, Andrew. It's just like.
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A
So you still get jitters, do you?
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Well, it's like, what am I going to talk about this time?
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A
Oh, sure.
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You know, sometimes I, I, I channel that kind of anxiety into, Well, I like changing song lyrics. Yeah, I do like it a lot. And I, I have a slight knack for doing it off the dome, even if it's not always great. I feel like the meter is usually there, which is important. Welcome to our book podcast.
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A
Meter made. There's another one for. Oh, no, Sir Paul's gonna get him out. There he is. He's in our inbox again.
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B
Dang it, Sir Paul.
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A
All you blokes pay me £1 million.
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B
I didn't know you were a listener.
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A
Sir Paul, for using me songs.
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B
He heard me using songs on the pod. Anyway, this is our book podcast where each week one of us tells the other person about a book that we've never read before. And you, the listener at home, can agree to disagree about any opinions you have on the book. Andrew, this week I read the first Miss Marple or Novel. The Murder at the Vicarage by one Agatha Christie.
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A
Not the first story.
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B
Not her first story.
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A
Because I was gonna have to fact check you about Ms. Marple and why.
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B
Did I read Miss Marple? Andrew, what month is it?
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A
It's January. This is the first episode we've recorded this year, which might explain some things about the cobwebs. We got shake off, apparently. But every January, since Congress stopped being able to function stuff, New copyrighted work is entering the United States public domain again. This started up, like late 2010s.
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B
Yep.
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And I have, off the top of my head, it's like books and art and movies and stuff that are 95 years old are entering. And then for music recordings, it's a hundred years.
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B
I thought this was. Is it? Oh, yeah, 95. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
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A
And so we've got. We've got some Christie in the public domain already. We've got Poirot in the public domain already. But this is. This is Ms. Marple's debut novel. It's in the public domain. We like the public domain. Yeah, it's cool. We've talked about it more. The House on Pooh Corner episode, I think, is the one where we get into it the most.
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B
Oh, sure.
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In the most detail. But yeah. So every January, we like to look at the list of the things that are entering the US public domain. We like to see. Hey, is it. Usually we find, like, three or four things that we've done already.
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Yeah, yeah.
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But, yeah, we like to look and see if there's anything we haven't done, and then we like to do it. So here we are with Ms. Marple.
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I did almost try to assign us the Maltese Falcon man, which. Which we have done.
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A
We have done. Yeah.
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But we also have done Agatha Christie before. Just not this one.
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Just not this one episode, Poirot.
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Episode 66. Back in 2014, I read the merger. The murder of Roger Ackroyd.
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The merger of Roger Ackroyd.
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Hercule Poirot had to get to the bottom of some business emails. And episode 487 in 2021, Andrew read the Murder on the Orient Express. Both of those have kind of a. The first one is, like a major twist and then the latter has, like, kind of a wacky murder solution.
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A
It's a wacky murder solution. And like a classically Agatha Christie, like, closed, like, locked room mystery. Like, the person who did it has to be in here with us because of contrivances that I've invented, which is.
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Something I found that, like, this is small town, cozy murder mystery. And one of the things I clocked early is that while there is a lot of concern with the timing around the murder, in the room where the murder took place, people can still come and go. Takes place over a few days. There's mystery.
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Just an open. An open door, a revolving door mystery.
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Bit of a revolving door mystery, a stroll down the lane mystery, as it were. So I'd be interested to talk about that. That was the first thing I noticed, having my other Christie experiences be kind of the more locked room situation. So, you know. So tell me more about Dame Agatha Mary Clarissa Christie. Lady mallow and born 1890, died 1976. Or don't, because we've already covered it and tell me about some other stuff.
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And we've all.
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B
We've.
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A
We've covered her already in the episodes that you mentioned. She is. She is. So I won't go into her a ton here, but she is known best for the Poirot stories and for this lady, Miss Jane Marple. The popular line about Agatha Christie is that only the Bible and the Shakespeare have sold more copies than she has. Yep, only the Bible and the Shakespeare. Extremely successful novelist, Ms. Marple herself appears first in the Tuesday Nightclub, which is a short story published in 1927 in the Royal Magazine, and then subsequently appears in a 1932 collection called the Thirteen Problems in the UK and the Tuesday Club Murders in the US okay, Craig, you can. You can and will tell me exactly how Marple is depicted and characterized in this book. My understanding is that she's a plucky old single lady who solves mysteries in the village of St. Mary Mead, usually referred to as a spinster. But I like to just think that she. I don't know. I don't think we need to put her in that box if we don't want to. She's, like, very loosely based on Christ, like step grandmother Margaret Miller and like some of her friends.
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B
Yep, yep.
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A
And then also shares some qualities with a character named Caroline Shepard, who had appeared in the murder of Roger Ackroyd. As the story goes, when that novel was adapted for the stage, Shepard was cut and replaced with a young woman, which encouraged Christie to make Marple an old lady. Just to get some old lady representation back into her. Back into her stories.
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Yes.
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A
You were gonna say something?
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B
Oh, I was going to say that. Which. Which I'm glad you had that note as well. I found that on an archived version of agathacristi.com.
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A
Yes.
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B
Yeah. Also the vicar, the titular vicar who is not who. Who did not die, who did not named Leonard and his wife Griselda Clement. They will.
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A
Amazing name.
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I know Leonard and Griselda. They. And. And she's younger than him, even though she has the older name. Griselda does. Okay. They will reappear in other Marple stories that are set in this little town, this little hamlet of St. Mary Mead.
- [11:24]
A
Where they do take place in later books. So my. She's a both Miller, Margaret Miller, the woman who Marple is partly based on and Marple herself. Quote, always expected the worst of everyone and everything and were with almost frightening accuracy usually proved right. My understanding is that Marple, especially at the beginning, is kind of a. Kind of a busy body kind of. People don't always love her. And when she starts poking her old nose into. Into mysteries, though in later books I think those edges would be softened a little bit. And then the. The question of her age is interesting to me. She is said in the books to be anywhere from 75 to almost 90 at different points. And she does also age slowly over the course of the series as it goes. It's a Time Lord, Miss Marple, she.
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B
Does have Time Lord energy. And this is a town as depicted, that is beset with gossiping older women. And Marple just happens to be the sharpest knife in the drawer who is the best at putting herself in a mysteries way. Sure, we'll talk a little bit about how she functions in the novel. I was surprised to find that she is not our perspective character. I thought that might be like, what sets it apart from Poirot, perhaps?
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A
What do you mean? Like, it's not a first person thing or.
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B
Well, or even. It's not even like a close. She's not our main character and she like kind of flits in and out of the story. It's not quite the way Hannibal Lecter functions where like the cops go to him for advice, but it is sort of a. Oh, the vicar is like moving the plot along and doing things and then every three to four chapters it's like. And then Ms. Marple was there and they chatted about what they thought about the mystery for a while and she said something a little cryptic and then the vicar goes off and does more detective work. So I was surprised. Just. I don't know, I thought maybe it was going to be more of a Murder She Wrote where she is like, you know, the lead of the novel going off and solving things. But maybe that happens in other books, I don't know.
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A
Christie writes 12 Miss Marple novels between 1930 and 1976. Most of those hit most, like, frequently in the 50s through the mid-60s.
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B
Okay.
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A
There are also 20 short stories, of which the last were published posthumously in 1979. A complete collection of all the Marple short stories was first published in 1985 and is still in print. I checked as of this afternoon. Print. This does put her in a firm second place in the Christie verse compared to Poirot. Just talking about Numby's.
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B
Okay.
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Who he first appears in 1920. He's in 33 novels and 50 short stories. And Poirot and Marple never meet in the books. There is no. There is no amazing crossover event that brings these characters together. I'm sure there is tons of fic. That does it, but Christie never did it herself.
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The.
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I am paraphrasing, but the reasoning that she gave for that is Poirot is a professional investigator, and he would not like this old lady coming in and telling him his business.
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Okay.
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Short stories featuring each character individually in their own, like, separate stories only appeared in one collection. They only appeared under the same roof one time, according to my research. 1960s. The adventure of the Christmas Pudding. I hope they figure that one out. Okay, Christy, I don't know. Here's just some ephemera about the. About the Chris Christie and what she wrote about the characters. Like, she. She did write one Poirot book and one Marple book that she put into basically a vault and left to her daughter husband.
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B
Album.
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A
Well, I mean, I don't.
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B
I don't think Shkreli got those books, though.
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A
No, I don't think that Wu Tang was like, hey, if we. If we die, we're leaving our heirs one Wu Tang album.
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B
Well, Wu Tang is forever, so.
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A
Yeah, well, okay, sure. But they basically were just like, in case I die or can't write anymore or something. Here is one book each of my most famous characters. You can publish them and make whatever money you can make off of them, which is. It's. It's canny, I think, because you is candy, the word I want. It's. It's. It's.
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B
Yeah, it might be.
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A
She has. It's at least forethought.
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B
True.
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A
It's. It's something because we're. Interest in somebody's work always spikes after they. After they pass away.
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B
Sure.
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A
And to know, hey, she's got these two fully baked books ready to go that are gonna get published. Yeah. Like, people are gonna buy those.
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B
That's true.
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A
Yeah. She, in 1974, falls and has A heart attack. And those two things stopped her from writing. And then she dies in 76, as we said. And then, as with Poirot, Ms. Marple has lived on in the last decade so. In 2022, there was a collection called 12 New Stories that brought together 12 new Ms. Marple short stories written by 12 new authors. And then one of the authors of one of those stories, Lucy Foley, in September of 2026, is publishing a new Marple novel called Murder at the Grand Alpine Hotel with the apparent blessing of Agatha Christie Limited, who's the company that handles the rights to her work. This is currently managed by her great grandson, but it's like ownership and corporate structure, and who it's been sold to over. Over many years is more than I really see a need to get into for our purposes. But I just wanted to draw that like it is. It is an officially sanctioned thing. I don't know if they considered that because there have been a bunch of other Poirot books all by, like, the same. The same author over the, like, 2010s and into the 2020s. And I don't know if that 12 Marple short stories thing was meant as like, an audition or as like a trial balloon for more Marple stuff, but it is somebody who's. Who's doing it officially and not someone who is taking advantage of the character's appearance in the public domain.
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B
Okay. Okay.
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A
And then, yeah, the other, the other little thing. Since. Since 2020, HarperCollins has had many Marple and Poirot stories altered by sensitivity readers to remove ethnic stereotypes.
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B
Ah, interesting.
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A
As far back as the 40s or 50s, I think they had to come up with a thing where it's like, you just. You can't keep. You can't keep calling every character who's portrayed negatively a Jew Agatha Christie. Like, we just, we're just gonna. We're just gonna start taking that one out, if that's okay.
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B
I noticed when. What edition this is.
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A
Yeah, I'm not. I don't know, I assume if it's like a modern ebook edition that you got the altered one, but I don't. I don't. I do not know, because that stuff.
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B
Right.
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A
Kind of by. By design. And we ran. We've run into it the most often with, like, middle grade scholastic fiction, but kind of by design, they do not draw attention to it when they do it.
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B
So this is a 2011 EPUB edition. I didn't notice anything untoward.
- [18:57]
A
Okay, well, it may be that there was untoward stuff and it was removed. Or maybe it was possible in there in the first place. And then you asked me one question. I didn't have a ton on the Angela Lansbury connection. You just. You said you wanted to see if I could find connections or.
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B
I recall that she played Miss Marple.
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A
And I thought, yeah, Lansbury is one of many, many, many older ladies who played Ms. Marple in various, like, film and TV adaptations. And I do think the. The vibe of that one of her turn as Marple sort of influenced Murder, She Wrote.
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B
Okay, okay.
- [19:34]
A
But there's not like a. There's not like a deeper connection to them than that.
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B
I know Murder She Said is a Marple novel, so maybe, I think any.
- [19:41]
A
Any time there's like an old spinster lady solving crimes, I think you got. You can probably trace the lineage back to. To Miss Marple.
- [19:49]
B
That's fair.
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A
I don't know the old ladies are out here solving crimes before Ms. Marple, but I would love to be proven wrong.
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B
I did Google, if we have cave.
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A
Paintings of old ladies solving. Solving murders or something, I would like to know about it.
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B
I googled a 03 Marple Poirot.
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A
Ooh.
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B
And I. I think something is happening with Agatha Harkness pulling a bunch of Agatha Christie. Anything with murder mystery. People are tagging Agatha Christie. I found a. A Winnie the Pooh Sherlock Holmes mystery set in St. Mary Mead.
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A
Is this Sherlock Holmes and Winnie the Pooh solving crimes together in the town where Miss Marple lives?
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B
I think there may have been a crime in the Hundred Acre Wood while they were carol singing in St. Mary Mead.
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A
Oh, bother.
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B
So, yeah.
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A
Yeah, those are. Those are the things I have. I mean, this is a character who is much beloved. She's sold many books.
- [20:57]
B
Yeah.
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A
And I'm curious to hear more about the marm, the myth, the legend.
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B
Yeah. We'll discuss Marple and the murder that she definitely solves and then reveals to the solution to the cops after a break.
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A
Okay.
- [21:29]
B
This episode is brought to you by Better Help Andrew. The new year doesn't require a new you.
- [21:35]
A
Good.
- [21:36]
B
Just a less burdened you.
- [21:40]
A
Sounds pretty new to me.
- [21:41]
B
Therapy.
- [21:42]
A
I don't know about this.
- [21:43]
B
Can help you identify what weighs you down by offering unbiased perspective to better understand your relationships and emotions and your goals and motives. I changed jobs last year. That's not always an easy process. You have to work to let go of any, like, doubt or imposter syndrome you might be dealing with. And that's a thing that therapy can help you with. Better help. Therapists Work according to a strict code of conduct and are fully licensed in the US and BetterHelp will match you with one of those quality therapists based on your needs and preferences. If you aren't happy, you can just switch to a different therapist at any time. BetterHelp makes it easy to get matched online with a qualified therapist. Sign up and get 10% off at betterhelp.com overdue betterhelp.com overdue this episode is brought to you by BetterHelp. Andrew the new year doesn't require a new you.
- [22:40]
A
Good.
- [22:40]
B
Just a less burdened you.
- [22:45]
A
Sounds pretty new to me.
- [22:46]
B
Therapy I don't know about this can help you identify what weighs you down by offering unbiased perspective to better understand your relationships and emotions and your goals and motives. I changed jobs last year. That's not always an easy process. You have to work to let go of any like doubt or imposter syndrome you might be dealing with. And that's a thing that therapy can help you with. Better help therapists work according to a strict code of conduct and are fully licensed in the US and BetterHelp will match you with one of those quality therapists based on your needs and preferences. If you aren't happy, you can just switch to a different therapist at any time. BetterHelp makes it easy to get matched online with a qualified therapist. Sign up and get 10% off at betterhelp.com overdue betterhelp.com overdue New Year same extra value meals at McDonald's. So now get two snack wraps plus fries and a medium soft drink for just $8 for a limited time only. Prices and participation may vary.
- [23:51]
A
Prices may be higher in Hawaii, Alaska and California. And for delivery. Hey Craig, read me a book. I could do it too.
- [24:08]
B
It's a murder. You might get sadder.
- [24:14]
A
Okay, tell me about. Tell me about the What's. What's the deal with this vicar and his. And his vicarage?
- [24:20]
B
In his vicarage. You know what a vicarage is?
- [24:23]
A
It's a place where. Like. It's a place where vicar lives.
- [24:26]
B
It's place where the vicar lives. You're right.
- [24:27]
A
Like a vicar. A vicar's den.
- [24:28]
B
It's. Yes, the Den of Vickery. This book is a murder mystery set in the cozy small town of St. Mary Mead. And our.
- [24:40]
A
How many murders can happen in a town before it's no longer described as cozy, do you think?
- [24:44]
B
I don't know. I think they say something like it's been at least 15 years since someone was murdered here.
- [24:53]
A
That's pretty Good, I guess.
- [24:54]
B
Might be more, but you got to.
- [24:55]
A
Roll the sign back over to zero.
- [24:57]
B
Yeah, you do. And this Ficar, he's in his, like, 40s. He's got a younger wife. The book opens with him kind of being surprised that he's married. I have always been of the opinion that a clergyman should be unmarried. Why I should have urged Griselda to marry me at the end of 24 hours acquaintance is a mystery to me. Marriage I've always held as a serious affair to be entered into only after long deliberation and forethought and suitably of tastes and inclinations is the most important consideration. Griselda is nearly 20 years younger than myself. She is most distractingly pretty and quite incapable of taking anything seriously. She treats. I don't know.
- [25:35]
A
It sounds like he thought it through to me. 20 years younger than me and she's pretty okay, I guess.
- [25:42]
B
Yeah. They're a little like C plot. D plot of a marriage. And I don't say that disparagingly. It's just not. The most important thing in the book is that, like, he loves her. He's kind of befuddled by her and.
- [26:00]
A
Just, like, why she's with him or.
- [26:02]
B
Yeah, a little bit. And like, you know, why did he con. Why did he change his life this way and. And embark on marriage? Also, they have a maid who is terrible at being a maid. She's a bad cook and mostly leaves things dirty and does, you know, to his, you know, disdain or whatever word I'm trying to say, he does not like it that she does not say sir or madam very often. They're made. He finds it frustrating.
- [26:30]
A
Does he keep her on because she ends up being the one who did it, or is it just like a funny character quirk that they have a bad maid?
- [26:37]
B
It's. It is both a funny character quirk because Griselda is like, well, but if she was, we can't afford to pay her a good wage, and if she were a better maid, she'd leave. So we have to be okay with her being kind of bad.
- [26:52]
A
Okay. Also, that's the invisible hand of the market. Orc baby.
- [26:56]
B
Yeah. Also, she does not wind up being the, like, the perpetrator. But some of her observations factor into the, you know, evidence as it unfurls. And the fact that she's a bad maid also factors into the final clue that tells Ms. Marple that she is correct in a way that is very silly.
- [27:18]
A
Okay, sure.
- [27:20]
B
This is a small town that has a man that no one likes. His name is Colonel Lucius Prothero, and he's one of the richest guys in town. He's a magistrate. He's very active in the church. And the first scene of the novel is them talking about how nobody likes him. And the vicar says something to the effect of, well, you know, if somebody killed him, they'd probably be doing this town a favor. He's just making an offhanded joke.
- [27:46]
A
I don't know about that.
- [27:47]
B
Vicar. We like the vicar, generally.
- [27:52]
A
Yeah, I don't know about that offhand observation, though. Who are you giving ideas to? It's just a small village full of highly unstable possible murderers.
- [28:03]
B
The colonel has identified that there's something fishy going on with the church's books. Some money has been disappearing. And later in the evening, he is planning to visit the vicar to talk about it. And it's not like the vicar is like, oh, no, he's gonna shake me down. He's just like. This guy just doesn't. He's just annoying and he's a grump to everyone. And his wife doesn't seem to like him and his daughter doesn't seem to like him. I'm gonna run down the character. Listen. With their don't. Likes of this guy because this is.
- [28:38]
A
Because they all need a motive to have possibly done it.
- [28:41]
B
Yes. And this book has a lot of characters. There's maybe too many.
- [28:47]
A
It's a whole village. Well, it takes a village.
- [28:49]
B
I have to carry a lot of them in my head so I can suspect all of them. And I found them to be a little too many. But there's the vicar's nephew, Dennis, who's by and large a fine kid.
- [29:01]
A
He did it.
- [29:02]
B
He does think it's funny when his uncle says that killing the sky would be good. And he likes detective stories. Of course, this is a detective story in which people read detective fiction. And so there's offhanded references to, like, well, that lady is suspicious, because ladies like that are suspicious in novels. You know, she's having fun with it, I think.
- [29:25]
A
Yet Christie, varying. Varyingly, like, leans into. And then tries to mislead you by leaning away from those stereotypes. Over the course of her books and.
- [29:38]
B
Her writing career and in my experience with her, it's never like. It's not a book club. It's like a detective book club where they're all wondering who the murderer is. It's like there's always one or two characters who are, like, a little excited that there's a crime because they read it in a book.
- [29:55]
A
Yeah. And this is. This is a boring, cozy village. Like, nothing happens here. It's so exciting.
- [30:00]
B
And there's also the Colonel's daughter, Latisse. It's spelled like. Okay, you know what? Sometimes a kid spells something with, like, the wrong vowel because the English language is a mess of sounds.
- [30:16]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [30:17]
B
And so, like, if you spelled lettuce, but you put an I instead of the U. Yeah, that'd be, like, perfectly fine. You'd think a kid was making a grocery list. This woman's name is Latice, but I just am reading lettuce the whole time.
- [30:30]
A
Lettuce.
- [30:31]
B
Lettuce.
- [30:31]
A
Lady Lettuce.
- [30:32]
B
Lady Lettuce. She's.
- [30:34]
A
She'sberg.
- [30:35]
B
She's the Colonel's daughter. Oh, boy. She doesn't like him. Her mom passed away. She doesn't like that he remarried. She doesn't like his second wife, Ann. It's pretty clear that Anne doesn't really like him either. She's been seen in the company of this painter who's living in town, Lawrence Redding, who is painting portraits of both the wife and the daughter. And he keeps getting into quarrels with the Colonel about, you know, how he keeps. How he spends his time.
- [31:15]
A
Sure.
- [31:15]
B
I think he's renting their house or something, like part of their property or something. The vicar did see them embracing Anne and Lawrence, the wife, and this painter, and he said, you guys need to stop this. You got you. You need. Like, one of you needs to leave town. You need to break this up. And they appeared to resolve to do so. We also find out about these other people, Andrew. There's an archaeologist named Dr. Stone, which I think is funny, and he is working a quarry or something that the Colonel's land encompasses.
- [31:54]
A
Okay.
- [31:55]
B
And so maybe there's some tension there with whether or not he's allowed to dig up as many bodies as he wants to dig up.
- [32:02]
A
I feel like quarries are for two things, and one of them is getting rocks out of the ground, and the other one is dumping bodies. You cannot have a quarry and not have it be a little suspicious.
- [32:11]
B
There's a strange lady who recently moved to town that nobody knows. Andrew, do you know what her Name is?
- [32:18]
A
No.
- [32:19]
B
Mrs. Lestrange.
- [32:22]
A
Mrs. Lestrange. Is she a vampire? She's okay.
- [32:28]
B
Later in the novel, it is revealed that some people saw her meeting with the Colonel the night before the murder. She must know him from somewhere, and they must have had a fraught conversation. There's a poacher who we never meet named Fred Archer, who got in Trouble with the colonel for killing animals he shouldn't have killed, I think.
- [32:50]
A
Did he poach? The Most Dangerous Game.
- [32:54]
B
There's the maid who works for the vicar who does snog. The poacher sometimes. Okay, so maybe. Maybe she did it.
- [33:04]
A
Maybe she did it.
- [33:05]
B
You know, there's the lady who works for the archaeologist, Ms. Gladys Cram, who just seems a bit of a. Like an excitable, nosy but dim woman is kind of what we're like. She just doesn't really seem to know what's going on. That's her deal. There's a doctor named Dr. Haydock. I don't know that we think Dr. Had.
- [33:31]
A
Maybe it's like a who's on first kind of joke about trying to get the doctor's attention here somewhere.
- [33:37]
B
I hadn't thought about that. He. He factors in as, you know, the primary coroner. He's going to tell you when the guy died. He's going to have some opinions about what happened to the body. He doesn't really factor into maybe he disliked this guy or didn't like him. But we do get an interesting conversation with him and the vicar that I really liked where he has some interesting thoughts on crime. That quote, I believe the time will come when we'll be horrified to think of the long centuries in which we've punished people for disease. And by this he means the disease of crime, which they can't help. Poor devils. You don't hang a man for having tuberculosis. So he thinks that like a capital punishment bad. So doc, I like that. But he's also thinking that. Then he goes on a whole rant about like teens who have the murder gene from. Which is like, well, okay, that's not real. But he does seem to have a. Like, maybe what this raises is the vicar thinks maybe this man would cover up a murder if he was sympathetic to the perpetrator.
- [34:47]
A
Sure.
- [34:49]
B
And then there's another guy who works in the church. His name is Hawes. I. I think he's a curate might be the term they use. He has some sort of sleeping sickness. He takes a lot of medicine. He seems very nervous. Something's going on with Hawes.
- [35:06]
A
Probably he killed somebody.
- [35:07]
B
Probably after them. I'll talk about the murder in just a second. But after the murder takes place, we do meet two cops. The ins. The Inspector Slack. All this is what the vicar says. All that I can say of Inspector Slack is that never did a man more determinedly strive to contradict his name.
- [35:26]
A
Huh.
- [35:26]
B
He works very hard. He's not very Personable. He doesn't really reveal much over the course of the novel about any evidence. He often has to be kind of cajoled into hearing appropriate evidence. But he is working very hard. There's Colonel Melchett. We like him. He's just nicer to the vicar. That's really too much. He's just there. There are some other old ladies who at various points in time gossip or spread evidence inadvertently. And there is Ms. Marple's nephew, who is a novelist, Raymond. He appears.
- [36:06]
A
I think Raymond is a recurring character in the Marple verse, but I think he's the Only one of Ms. Marple's family members who we.
- [36:14]
B
Yes.
- [36:15]
A
Who we really spend any significant time with.
- [36:18]
B
I think there's a jab at one point where the vicar says, yes, his poems are successful, but they don't use capital letters. And I don't know how I feel about that.
- [36:29]
A
Yeah, same.
- [36:31]
B
Then there is, of course, our hero, Ms. Marple, who lives next door to the vicar and everyone says is an extremely observant person. If it happened and she could have seen it, she knows. And even some other things that maybe she couldn't have seen, she knows about.
- [36:47]
A
That does make her sound like the, like the nosy across the street neighbor in a. In a sitcom like Bewitched who's always trying to figure out what the deal is with the people across the street.
- [36:57]
B
Yes. And I. Maybe I was just so excited for whenever she appeared. I could see how characters would find her annoying for when she kind of bursts in. And the cops are always like, ugh, this lady's showing up with her theories and questions. But from the vicar's perspective, like, this lady's always right. She always knows what's going on, even if she's being a little annoying. Like, we have to listen to her because she has more information than we do.
- [37:30]
A
This is a classic setup for, like, one's a cop, one's a weirdo, they solve crimes together, set up it.
- [37:37]
B
It's a little bit like that, actually, because the vicar is like, at every interrogation and, like, no one suspects the vicar for reasons that I'll get into in just a second. And he's exonerated pretty early. And so they, they let him come to, like, every part of the investigation because it happened in his house and he's a vicar. And so they're like, well, we trust this vicar. And sometimes people will say things to him they won't say to the cops. And the guy died in his house. So, like, he deserves to know what happened. Okay, so the vicar gets to be our primary detective.
- [38:23]
A
I would have expected it to be Miss Marple in a Miss Marple book.
- [38:26]
B
I thought so too, but. Okay, but I, but I, I thought back and like, Poirot is not often the, like the. In the way that like, Holmes stories are often told from Watson's perspective. Right. And so like, you don't. You don't get full access to the genius mind, you just encounter it when the story needs you to. That sort of thing. So Andrew, this guy, nobody likes him, is found dead in the vicar's house, shot in the back of a head.
- [39:00]
A
And is it, as the vicar said, is it. Does it make everything better that he's dead?
- [39:05]
B
In the long term, I guess. Okay, in the short term, there's a lot of, you know, sturm and drang about who killed this guy.
- [39:13]
A
No, just. I'm glad to hear you endorse this man's murder.
- [39:17]
B
Oh, fair.
- [39:18]
A
You got me on Mr. I don't like the death penalty.
- [39:21]
B
You're right. You got me.
- [39:22]
A
Yeah. It's good that he's dead.
- [39:24]
B
Dang it.
- [39:25]
A
You did it.
- [39:26]
B
I shouldn't have consented to this recording. Actually, Pennsylvania.
- [39:32]
A
No, there's a one party consent. I watched all of the Good Wife where every third episode turns on whether a recording took place at a one party consent.
- [39:46]
B
So there is also. Andrew, I think you'll appreciate this. There are pranks.
- [39:51]
A
I'll be the judge of that.
- [39:52]
B
They're prank phone calls in this book. Ooh, they're crank anchors in this book.
- [39:58]
A
What cranks are they yanking?
- [40:00]
B
The vicar gets called away from his home at like 5:30pm on the night of the murder. I think it's a Thursday.
- [40:08]
A
To talk to IP Freely on the phone.
- [40:13]
B
Somebody is dying on a farm somewhere. And he goes to the farm and the guy's totally fine. And he's like, well, that's annoying. And it's like a two mile walk. So he's in, you know, he's off the grid for a period of time. His wife is out of town, she's coming back on a train. A little bit later, he comes home and he sees the painter, Lawrence Redding. There's been some setup in the novel before you see this happen. Lawrence Redding is leaving his house, leaving the vicar's house. The vicar's like, oh, I'm running a little. Like, I think I'll get home just in time for my meeting with the Colonel. I didn't expect to get called away. And Lawrence running is like, oh, you'll see the Colonel. All right. And, like, disappears into the bushes.
- [40:57]
A
Whoa.
- [40:57]
B
You're like, what? And you go into the room and the Colonel is dead, shot in the head. And the clock is knocked. Which, again, Andrew, you know, nailed me. I. It's a good thing, I'll admit it. That's not true.
- [41:13]
A
Clock is knocked over.
- [41:14]
B
Clock is knocked over.
- [41:15]
A
And I suppose it's. Has the clock stopped?
- [41:17]
B
It has stopped.
- [41:19]
A
Okay. So it might record the exact time of the murder. That's interesting.
- [41:23]
B
6:22Pm There's a note under the man's hand that he appeared to be writing that says, I can wait no longer for you. And then there's also. He wrote 6:20pm at the top of the page.
- [41:39]
A
Okay.
- [41:41]
B
Now, the first thing that the vicar note, like, identifies is that they always set that clock ahead by, like, 15 minutes.
- [41:51]
A
Okay.
- [41:51]
B
Which just messes with everyone's timelines. I still have trouble. I flipped through pages in this book trying to keep track of this, like, we set the clock ahead thing. And I couldn't make sense of it other than it is clear that whoever messed with the clock, it just reveals that somebody messed with the clock on purpose rather than, oh, the dead man's hand knocked it over and then it stopped. Like, it. Yeah, that's the information that it's just like it's somebody.
- [42:22]
A
Somebody tried to make this clock a part of it, but they didn't know this thing about the 15 minutes.
- [42:27]
B
Yes, exactly. Exactly. And so they start investigating this murder. Inspector Slack slows shows up first. He doesn't really want to listen to what the vicar has to say about the clock. They start talking to people. Nobody heard a shot in the study. You would think that maybe the maid would have heard it. She was the only one in the house. She did not.
- [42:52]
A
She's a bad maid, though.
- [42:54]
B
Yeah, well, she's the.
- [42:55]
A
Yeah, yeah, she said, I know she's a bad maid. At this point, like, how many. How thoroughly have we met all these characters? At this point?
- [43:01]
B
We've met almost all of them.
- [43:03]
A
Okay.
- [43:04]
B
We have not heard all of their deals, but we've met most of them. We've certainly met the bad maid. And later she said, I think. She says that she heard a sneeze. I think I got that right. She says she heard a Sneeze.
- [43:19]
A
Okay.
- [43:19]
B
Also, Ms. Marple says she didn't hear anything, though. As they talk to more people in the town, a lot of people say they thought they heard a shot in the woods. So I spend a decent partial part of this book wondering who shot the Vicar in the woods and then moved him. Not the vicar, moot. Shot this guy in the woods and then moved him into the Colonel. Yeah, yeah, that's not what happens. But I could not talk about this book without spoiling the ending. So like we're, we're more than halfway through. You could stop and go read the book. It's.
- [43:54]
A
If it's old enough to be in the public domain, you have forfeited all of your rights to complaining about spoiler spoilers.
- [44:01]
B
Fine. I'm just saying if somebody wants. Now they're like, oh, this sounds interesting. Now is a good time to stop listening. And then like all the ads have rolled.
- [44:09]
A
So. Yeah, because if, because if you email us about it, I will make fun.
- [44:13]
B
Of you and we'll put your email in the public domain so everyone can find it. And so a lot of people are talking about this shot they heard in the woods. One bit I like Andrew, is that like the one lady comes to. Some old lady comes to the cops to complain.
- [44:33]
A
Some old lady.
- [44:34]
B
That's, that's the really the vibe that the book gives. It's like just some old lady shows up. It's not Ms. Marple, it's some other, it's some other cat, as they say at one point.
- [44:43]
A
Okay.
- [44:45]
B
And she's complaining about, you know, being abused on the phone by somebody who called her. And she won't really say what they said to her, but she does say that it happened around 6:30 because she remembers hanging up the phone and hearing the church bells and then hearing a shot in the woods or something. So you're like what I like about. Ultimately that resolves into nothing related to the murder. It's just prank phone calls that are coincidentally happening while murder related prank phone calls are happening. But I like the way that Christie over the course of the novel uses the network of people to like sprinkle crime relevant details without actually like solving anything in front of you and without needing it to be a kind of locked room mystery where all of the crucial details are trapped within the Vickers house.
- [45:42]
A
Sure. Yeah. It's a bunch of, it's trying to sift out the relevant clues from the not relevant clues.
- [45:48]
B
This whole book is a kettle of red herrings and it is your job to get to the bottom to find.
- [45:57]
A
The regular colored herring.
- [46:03]
B
This whole book is about like redirection and obfuscation. It is not about hidden motives or anything like that.
- [46:15]
A
Not like an intricate thing where they, they, they've given you all the clues. Like once you get to the end and you do know how it went down. Does it make it clear in retrospect or not really?
- [46:29]
B
The motives are crystal clear. The actual murder is revealed as a, like, rather quickly thrown together scheme that seemed pretty successful if not for Ms. Marple's intuitions about human nature and her keen observational skills. But the. And the mechanics of the murder itself, the couple details, it really turns on as a solution I found to be a little silly.
- [47:02]
A
Okay.
- [47:03]
B
Which we'll get to. So I'll try to move kind of quickly through all the other stuff that happens. The main thing in the beginning of the book is that two confessions roll in. First from Lawrence the Painter. And he's like, listen, it's my gun. Which they know it was his gun. And they're like, oh, my God, it was my gun. I shot him at this time. And, like, his timeline is all over the place, but he does put himself into custody. And so the first thing that the vicar thinks is that, oh, he did love Ann. I saw them embracing. Maybe he's trying to protect Anne. Maybe Ann did it. And then I don't even know that she knows that he's been arrested. Yet Anne appears and is like, vicar and the police. I need to tell you that I did it. I'm the one who shot him. And this one is even more like, no, you didn't. Because there's a scene where they're like, oh, you went to the vicarage. Yes, I went along to the window. There were no voices. I looked in, I saw my husband. Something came over me and I fired. And then. Then. Oh, then I went away. Oh, man. Then I went away.
- [48:20]
A
You didn't even think through your little Spartacus bit, did you?
- [48:23]
B
No. And so it's. They are both released under the, you know, understanding that they are suspecting each other of doing it and trying to, you know, protect the other person.
- [48:35]
A
Sure. Okay.
- [48:36]
B
So then we spend a decent part of the novel moving around the town, learning a lot of the character tidbits that I've already talked about, getting a sense of the web of relationships.
- [48:48]
A
That's. Yeah, that's why I was asking, like, if we knew everybody before we hit the murder or not. Because I was trying to figure out how it compares to the structure of a modern crime procedural thing where usually it's like the opening scene we see a body, and then after that we meet everybody.
- [49:03]
B
It's.
- [49:04]
A
I mean, it's.
- [49:06]
B
As I recall, it. It is a little bit of both where you get, from the vicar's perspective, a kind of a Rundown of a lot of different characters that he's been like thinking about in his parish and dealing with. And then you meet them firsthand, most of them after the murder has been committed.
- [49:26]
A
Okay. Yeah. Even thinking about that kebaquad murder mystery thing that I. Oh yeah. A few weeks ago it was like. Yeah. The very first thing you find out is that this lady died.
- [49:36]
B
Yes.
- [49:36]
A
And then you only find all the. Find out about all the people after.
- [49:40]
B
So. So the thing that we. We also spend a lot of time intermittently with Ms. Marple and her whole deal is human nature. She. All of her deduction is based on her decades of observing people and learning about human nature. Okay, I'm going to give you her words about it. It's really what people call intuition and make such a fuss about. Intuition is like reading a word without having to spell it out. A child can't do that because it has had so little experience. But a grown up person knows the word because they've seen it often before. Okay, sure, whatever. There's a scene where she's talking to the vicar and the cops and she's like, man, this case just reminds me of so many other things that have happened. It reminds me of a church warden who had a secret family. It reminds me of a woman who is motivated to frame someone else due to spite inconvenience. It reminds me of a time that the organists stole money from the choir boys.
- [50:48]
A
Has she lived in the same town this whole time?
- [50:50]
B
I think so.
- [50:51]
A
Okay. And so are these all things that happened in this town in that's bygone eras?
- [50:56]
B
I guess that's what we're to understand. Okay, but this is the like Hannibal Lecter bit where she's like, I can't tell you what I'm thinking, but I am going to tell you a bunch of stories to things that might lead you to suss out other things relevant to this case.
- [51:14]
A
Like is this for the benefit of we the reader or for the in story cops? Or like who is she?
- [51:20]
B
I think it's mostly for the vicar.
- [51:22]
A
Or she just doing this in like a Grandpa Simpson, like had it on you, on my belt kind of way.
- [51:29]
B
It's not qu. No, it's not as bad as that. She is relating to the. The vicar has never solved a mystery with her before.
- [51:38]
A
Okay.
- [51:38]
B
But she is relating like her process involves thinking about like something about this case is making her think about all these other things that have happened and so she's sharing those other things. It seems to be like they're clues for the vicar to go off and chase down because she has her own thinking and she's gonna, you know, she can't be the keen observer she is if she's racing between all the evidence trying to suss it out. She needs to be just observing people where they are, you know. And then later in the novel when she's kind of asked, like, why she's so invested in this murder, she says, living alone, as I do, in a rather out of the way part of the world, one has to have a hobby. There's of course wool work and guides and welfare and sketching, but my hobby is and always has been human nature so varied and so fascinating. And of course, in a small village with nothing to distract one, one has such ample opportunity for becoming what I might call proficient. In one's study, one begins to class people quite definitely just as though they were birds or flowers. Group so and so Genus this, species that. I don't know. I don't know about that, Ms. Marple.
- [52:54]
A
Yeah. Genus, species that.
- [52:56]
B
Whatever one takes a little problem. A quite unimportant mystery, but absolutely incomprehensible unless one solves it right. It's fascinating to apply one's judgment and find that one is right. But I have always wondered whether if someday a really big mystery came along, I should be able to do the same thing. I mean, solve it correctly. Logically, it ought to be exactly the same thing. So she's like, I don't know that she's ever solved a murder before. This is kind of interesting to her.
- [53:24]
A
But she's like, let me, let me take, take the opportunity that this man's death presents me to like put my little theory into practice here.
- [53:32]
B
Yeah, yeah. So the vicar does a lot of police work. As I've said, there's all sorts of things going on. He encounters Lawrence Redding in the woods holding a weird rock. He talks with Ms. Lestrange and then finds a ripped up painting of a lady in the colonel's attic. He gets random notes from all the ladies about town about various details that they saw or think they saw. And he meets all of the characters that I laid out earlier the the night where he gets all these random notes from the old ladies coincides with the curate Hawes, who has that sickness, who visits him, clearly distraught almost, you know, sharing some big bit of information, but not. And he can't do his like Saturday sermon that he's supposed to do, so the vicar has to do it. He gives a like, repent ye sinners speech. He has not prepared his speech. So this one's a little off the dome and he's like really upset and everybody's in the parish and so some, you know, he kind of whips them up a little bit. This does cause Hawes to freak out and call him with some sort of confession that he does not elaborate on. So they race over there and find that he has overdosed on some medicine or something and he's holding a note in his hand.
- [55:00]
A
Now, Andrew, they're always doing this. Everybody's always holding a note or like they, they scrawled something in blood on the floor with their last breath like that. This stuff is always happening.
- [55:11]
B
Andrew, I've. I've allided over two things to get to this point. I'll just point out one, there's a big scene a little earlier where there is an inquest at the town inn where everybody presents.
- [55:22]
A
Where you would. That's where you would have an inquest.
- [55:24]
B
Yeah. They present all of the evidence they've gathered, including the bogus confessions and all sorts of other material that lead them to say, well, no one, we don't know who committed this crime. That's what, that's what we know.
- [55:40]
A
Okay? And good job, boys.
- [55:43]
B
Yes, the other.
- [55:46]
A
Well done.
- [55:46]
B
The other main bit of information we've learned about the crime scene is that they have proven that the dead colonel did not write any of the things on that piece of paper that it looks like he wrote.
- [55:58]
A
Okay?
- [55:59]
B
He did not write 6:20pm which was in one bit of ink. Nor did he write I can no longer wait for you, which was presumably written to the vicar in a different set of ink. So that was a fake note is what we are here to understand.
- [56:15]
A
Okay?
- [56:16]
B
The note in Hawes's hand was real. It was a note from the Colonel saying that Hawes was, you know, pilfering money from the church, presumably to pay for his medicinal needs, some sort of addiction or something, and somebody did something bad to him with his drugs which caused him to almost die from an overdose. Okay, this is after a lot of book that I've, you know, we don't have time for.
- [56:44]
A
That's fine.
- [56:46]
B
Ms. Marple shows up, okay?
- [56:48]
A
She's back.
- [56:49]
B
The vicar and the cops and the doctor are at this scene with Hawes and Ms. Marples. Like, hey, when you tried to call the, the one cop, you actually called me by mistake and I heard that you were over here, so I raced over here to tell you what I know about the murder, I solved it. I solved the murder, okay? I'VE wondered throughout a lot of things in this book who the murderer might be. We had the two false confessions or the two confessions that were not real. We have the doctor with his interesting notions of crime. We have the wronged daughter who does not like how controlling her dad is. We have this mysterious strange lady.
- [57:30]
A
We have the one whose name has strange in it.
- [57:33]
B
Yes.
- [57:34]
A
Okay.
- [57:35]
B
We have the archaeologist who just wants to dig bones. Or does he? Maybe he's actually a thief pretending to be an archaeologist who just wanted to steal a silver tray from the colonel's house and. And then maybe murdered him so that he didn't get caught. That's a whole side plot of this book that's very confusing.
- [57:56]
A
What's he really digging for?
- [57:58]
B
He's not digging. He's a thief posing as an archeologist because Ms. Marple's nephew knows the real archeologist is like, that's not the archeologist. Okay? And Ms. Marple is like, listen, I had seven suspects. There were a lot of them. I'm going to run through them now and tell you why none of them are the. Are the killer, which she does. And then she's like, hey, here's who the killer is. It's the painter. It's the guy from the beginning.
- [58:28]
A
Okay. Was he the most likely suspect the whole time or the least? Like, okay, she, she.
- [58:34]
B
And then gives like a little speech which is like, in the stories it's always somebody who's like the least suspected, but in real life it's always the person who makes the most sense. But there was this whole false confession thing which threw everybody off, and I think he killed him in league with the wife, Ann. Oh, so they were.
- [58:56]
A
They were seen hugging.
- [58:58]
B
Well, that's the funny thing I. That I like a lot is she tells them that, oh, man, this murder. Okay, the main thing that seals the.
- [59:11]
A
Deal for losing and losing your Marples over there.
- [59:13]
B
I am. The main thing that she, like, kind of locked in on is the. She saw them the night of the murder, go into a little studio on the vicar's property where the man was doing his paintings. She saw them embrace and rush in there and. And she says, human nature being what it is, I'm afraid they realize that I shan't leave the garden till they come out again. So she is. Ms. Marple's like, Listen, I am going to stand there and wait until they leave this building.
- [59:44]
A
Yep.
- [59:45]
B
When they do come out, their demeanor is gay and natural. And there, in reality, they made a mistake. Because if they had really Said goodbye to each other as they pretended. They would have looked very different. But you see, that was their weak point. They simply dare not appear upset in any way. So there's this, like, interesting tell to Ms. Marple that these two people who had just committed murder and then realized they were seen together pretended to be super happy and not murderers.
- [60:17]
A
Huh. When she knows they did it.
- [60:20]
B
Yes. When she knows that that is. She immediately realizes that's a front. Because if they were actually, like, innocent and breaking up, then they would have left. Very sad.
- [60:30]
A
I do kind of love. And again, this. This goes back to a crime procedural sort of tropied thing when the. When somebody on the team, like, when they've cornered the suspected perp who, you know did it.
- [60:44]
B
Yep.
- [60:44]
A
And they don't have anything on this person. They don't have any. They don't have a confession. They don't have any material evidence. They don't have anything. But the weirdo who works with the cops, like, nails them down. Exactly. Psychologically. And then they just like, effortlessly confess because they're so relieved to have found another soul who, like, understands theirs. Yeah. And they just, like. They set themselves up to take the fall because they not even take the fall. They just. They sign their own. They sign their own. Not death warrant warrants. They're not dying.
- [61:18]
B
Regular warrant.
- [61:19]
A
They sign their own regular warrant by confessing.
- [61:24]
B
Shit. We don't get that.
- [61:25]
A
Don't do that part. Don't do that part, gang.
- [61:27]
B
We don't get that quite. Which I. Which is even almost sillier. That would honestly make more sense to me as a reader in 2025 if she rolled this out in front of Lawrence Redding and he was like, ah, yes, you've. You've seen you.
- [61:42]
A
You've bested me.
- [61:43]
B
Yes. No, she has figured out when she was visiting the vicar's room, there's a dead potted plant in there, a dying potted plant.
- [61:56]
A
Okay.
- [61:57]
B
And she thought of the maid and how bad the maid is who never waters the plant. And she concocted a theory of the crime where Lawrence planted his gun in the dead plant because he knew that no one would find it because no one watered.
- [62:18]
A
Because nobody. Yeah. Nobody's paying attention to the plant.
- [62:21]
B
And so then he could leave and be seen, and then the wife could come into the room and use the gun and shoot the guy. And then the gun would be hidden again. And that way when people saw her on the street for her alibi, not holding a handbag, which is a very strange thing for a lady Going shopping to do.
- [62:41]
A
It's very strange. This is all circumstantial, Ms. Marple.
- [62:44]
B
Then she would not have been suspected of carrying a gun because she didn't have a handbag. Also, there was definitely a silencer because the maid heard a sneeze and that's what the silencer sounds like. Also, they found that weird rock in the woods because it's like picric acid or something, which is like a mini dynamite. So if you drop it, it makes a popping sound. And clearly Lawrence Redding rigged it up with rope and matches in the woods and tried to time it so that it would fall around when he shot the dude or when the dude got shot. And that's the noise everybody heard in the woods. That's the part of the crime that made me put the book down for a second. Like, why did this man, Rube Goldberg, a rock in the woods to sound like a gunshot?
- [63:33]
A
To distract everyone. To distract everybody and make them think that the time the murder took place at a time it didn't cause. Right. Like, to give somebody an alibi they shouldn't have had.
- [63:42]
B
The. The biggest stumbling block for me is that I don't know when they started planning any of this murder stuff. And the book is kind of vague about that, about, like, how long was this scheme. There's a whole question of whether of, like, when the gun left his house. That's, like, not important. But it's not like there was a. At least that I could suss out, like, a clear reason why they had to murder him that day or on what timeline. There was a. Well, we know what his plans are because he's plant. He's very publicly telling everyone he's going to go talk to the vicar. So, like, we could at least do it there. But that it's a very complicated murder to have come together so quickly in my estimation. The scene ends with Ms. Marple saying, let's set a little trap, shall we? And they somehow contrive for Anne and Lawrence to be alone together, but, like, around the corner from some cops.
- [64:47]
A
So it's entrapment.
- [64:48]
B
They, like, spill their. They spill their, you know, scheme and how they're going to run away to each other within earshot of cops who are then like, heard you talking about the murder you committed, you're arrested and then they go to trial and then the book is like, very like, we're not going to talk about this. It's very clear. They went to trial and they were convicted for shooting this guy.
- [65:09]
A
Yeah, the trial is always like, What? You know, the truth always comes out at a trial.
- [65:14]
B
Yep. And everybody probably admitted all the evidence from Miss Marple and it went fine. And then we get a little.
- [65:22]
A
The Supreme Court precedent set by the Miss Marple cases.
- [65:28]
B
We do get a little, like, denouement of the Miss Lestrange, who was, in fact, a secret part of the colonel's life. His daughter is actually Miss Lestrange. His daughter. Miss Lestrange has, like, a terminal illness and she wanted to spend some time with her daughter before she passed. And the colonel was stopping him from doing that. Stopping her from doing that. Yada, yada, yada. Oh, and the vicar's wife is pregnant. They're gonna have a family.
- [66:06]
A
That's nice, right? Or is it?
- [66:08]
B
And Miss Marple knows.
- [66:10]
A
Oh, Miss Marple. So I can't. I mean, does the book end before you hear what extremely specific, like, oh, you would have had a pack of tissues in your bag on Tuesday if you weren't pregnant?
- [66:23]
B
It's possible. It's in there. I can't remember, though. She does make a. Like, the way that she tells the vicar that she knows is, like. She's like, where's your wife? And the vicar's like, oh, she's, like, off playing tennis. And Miss Marple's like, should she be playing tennis right now?
- [66:43]
A
Boo.
- [66:46]
B
It's a fun book. It's very silly.
- [66:49]
A
Yeah. What'd you like it? What'd you like about it?
- [66:51]
B
I like.
- [66:52]
A
Sounds like you liked the kooky characters. Mostly. It's just there were a lot of them.
- [66:57]
B
There were very many of them, and I didn't quite. You know, part of the fun is trying to, like, separate the signal from the noise, as our friend Nate Silver used to say. But he's not our friend. He's no one's friend.
- [67:14]
A
But there's a lot of everybody mad today. Paul McCartney, Nate Silver.
- [67:20]
B
That's everyone. There's a lot of, like, running between talking to maids and talking to these, like, butlers and talking to all these busybodies. That is fun. And I like how different parts of the crime, like, get filtered through all those different voices. I kind of liked that it wasn't a locked room with a set of known suspects. That was kind of neat. Like, even Miss Marple says she has a list of seven, but she doesn't reveal them until she's ruling them out and telling you who did it. So, like, the vicar's kind of along for the ride, not even knowing who could be a suspect. I think the stuff with the thief Posing as an archaeologist to steal some, like, priceless kitchen cutlery or whatever.
- [68:14]
A
It feels like a different book that's kind of happening off to the side of this book.
- [68:17]
B
It really does, and it doesn't. Neither of those characters even, like, reveal something important about the murder. So I was kind of left a little adrift with those folks.
- [68:30]
A
Sure.
- [68:31]
B
And I was just really. I did enjoy how Marple functions in the book. I like her, like, different notion of what she's there to solve. There's kind of like the amateur sleuth is a fun character type here. Yeah.
- [68:50]
A
But it definitely seems like the way, like, the form that her genius takes. You have to kind of get it doled out to you in little, like, designated marble breaks. Like, you can't be. You can't be getting. Absorbing that information in real time.
- [69:04]
B
There's also the thing where, like, she will say that she saw something with her keen eyes and everybody is like, yes. She always sees everything. She's like, I mean, I wasn't looking at them. I was observing a bird 100 yards away, and I saw that person go into the woods and remembered it forever. And you're like, okay, miss.
- [69:26]
A
Okay, Grandma.
- [69:27]
B
But yeah. So it's one of those things where in this book is interesting because the perpetrators of the crime are. They try to get away with it by confessing to it in a way that tries to hide themselves publicly. Like, that is an interesting version of a mystery to me where, you know, one of the things about this small town is that everybody knows everybody's business. So if you were going to try to cover up a crime, you would have to make yourself very visible in a bunch of ways and, like, take advantage of this whisper network and this gossip.
- [70:06]
A
Yeah, you have to. You'd have to be very visible and also acting super normal.
- [70:10]
B
Yes. Yes. And so, like, I just like that they know about the superpowers that Ms. Marple has and they have to kind of plan around them. And yet she has just one more step of intuition that they could not consider.
- [70:26]
A
Sure.
- [70:28]
B
And yeah. So I honestly would like. If folks have read other Marple novels and want to write in about them, I'd love to know more about the other, like, characters in the town who are maybe the main characters of different books.
- [70:40]
A
Yeah.
- [70:40]
B
Because I would. I don't really know how you build a book around Marple as the primary character.
- [70:47]
A
Well, also, surely you would not be, like, switching this cast out every time.
- [70:51]
B
I don't think so. Unless we're just not the whole.
- [70:54]
A
Yeah, I don't know, like on the one hand you wouldn't want to switch the whole cast out every time. On the other hand, you would want to. I mean, if you're creating a bunch of characters with this level of specificity around this one crime, you're going to want to have room to do that for other different crimes down the road.
- [71:09]
B
So there are probably like three other old ladies in this book that you could build books around. Like something could happen to them, you know. So that's the Murder at the Vicarage. Andrew, I'm so glad we saw.
- [71:21]
A
I'm glad we solved the mystery of Is Craig gonna read the book?
- [71:25]
B
We did. We did.
- [71:27]
A
And you done it.
- [71:28]
B
I did it. Who done it? Me. Me. Thanks for listening everyone. You can send us your thoughts about Ms. Marple. Send us an email overdupodmail.com, hit us up on social media @overduepod. Thanks to Connor, Ella, Rebecca, Meredith, Jane and more for reaching out in the past week. A lot of folks responding to our January schedule, which Andrew can help us talk through in just a second. Our theme song is composed by Nick Laranges. Andrew, if folks want to know more about the show, where do they go?
- [72:01]
A
Overduepodcast.com is the Internet website. We have the schedule for January. We have all the past episodes of the show. We have all the links Craig just mentioned all up there for you to use. We also have a patreon project patreon.com overduepod Give us a little bit of cold hard cash and get rewards and bonus episodes in our ad free episodes and rewards like our bonus episodes and our long read projects which we're rolling over shortly which Craig can tell you about when we talk about the schedule and did I say discord? Did I say newsletter? Dusty bookshelves, special collections, episodes where we talk about other non book things including many of the premier 3D animated films of the 2010s.
- [72:54]
B
Yep.
- [72:56]
A
Yeah, that's the thing. Next week I'm reading Glorious Exploits by Fergie Lennon. Craig, what else is happening?
- [73:04]
B
We're going to talk about Dick and Jane, some fun early readers by Zerna Sharp and William S. Gray.
- [73:10]
A
And we're that one also is a public domain selection and we're going to.
- [73:16]
B
Start our next long read series called Tokyo Drifters where we are going to read Akira, the manga by. I'm looking up the author's name as I do this so I don't mess it up. Katsuhiro Otomo. Okay, so very excited. I've seen the film, a seminal manga yeah. So I'm excited to read about Kaneda and Tetsuo and a bunch of babies with psychic powers.
- [73:48]
A
Spoilers for.
- [73:50]
B
I mean, I guess they show up pretty early, the babies with the psychic powers, so.
- [73:55]
A
You're right. And the weird old babies. All right, everybody, thank you for listening to our show. And until we talk to you next week, please try to be happy. That was a Headgum podcast.