But it was an amusing reminder of how Fleming got the name for his muscular hero from a wimpish ornithologist and crucially, it gave Higson the opportunity to write in a cameo role for himself as the unlikely original Bond. So asks a stranger of Miss Jane Marple while she is vacationing on luxurious St. You also see Season Hubley as Molly Kendall, Swoosie Kurtz as Ruth Walter, and Cassie Yates as Lucky Dyson. Rafiel, and Jameson Parker as Tim Kendall. The movie casts Helen Hayes as Miss Jane Marple, Barnard Hughes as Mr. The effort to get Marple to bump into Christie’s Caribbean-loving contemporary Ian Fleming (Jeremy Crutchley) felt a little awkward (Higson has published a series of children’s books about a youthful James Bond). The movie, A Caribbean Mystery, features some extremely talented actors and actresses. Indeed the key to the entire mystery, a glass eyeball, stared viewers in the face even as the titles rolled, and the recognisable but hardly stellar cast (apart from Antony Sher) played it all with an admirable lightness of touch. Not so different from Miss Marple’s exciting life back in St Mary Mead, perhaps, but Higson brought an easy wit to his script. Against a backdrop of palm trees and glinting blue ocean, Marple (Julia McKenzie) was confronted with a snapshot of post-colonial hedonism: blustering old soldiers, cavorting toffs, drunken philanderers – and a hotelier with a habit of dispatching his wives. But A Caribbean Mystery was as fresh as a breeze running in off the sea on a hot Bermudan night.Īdapted from one of Christie’s later books, it plucked the spinster sleuth from her cosy world of chocolate box cottages and bumbling vicars and plonked her down on the shimmering West Indies isle of St Honoré. ITV’s star-spangled Poirot and Marple mysteries have, over the years, become such grand, opulently produced institutions, they sometimes lapse into ponderousness totally at odds with their featherlight source material. Gerard O’Donovan reviews A Caribbean Mystery, the first of three Agatha Christie’s Marple adaptations for ITV for London’s Telegraph.įast Show veteran Charlie Higson, too, had a stab at rewriting history in his entertaining Agatha Christie’s Marple.

Miss marple a caribbean mystery