“Scandal and tea at four-thirty.”

Good times with Miss Marple. I wish there would have been a bit more scenes with her, though.

Maybe it’s just my own expectations of the role titular detectives should play in their own series, though. There is no written rule saying that the detectives must play the largest role in their books over other characters, it’s just what we’re used to. The vicar was a good pair of eyes to see this story through, after all. I admit it would be fun to see through Miss Marple’s eyes, but Agatha Christie’s storytelling style only works if the reader is kept in the dark. If we were to infiltrate Miss Marple’s mind through POV (or Hercule Poirot’s), we would have the fun of seeing them react to other characters’ perceptions of them, but we would be robbed of the opportunity to figure it all out for ourselves.

Plus, it is never not funny to see people constantly underestimate MM or HP.

This one is Miss Marple’s first ‘adventure,’ where she tries out her self-discovered knack of puzzling out human motivation on a larger scale than before. Instead of missing teapots, she is now trying to find the murderer of a particularly misliked village man named Colonel Protheroe. Her neighbor Len the Vicar is our eyes into the story, and he does his share of detective work, owing to his need to puzzle out what happened because the Colonel was murdered in the vicarage, hence the title. His much younger wife also takes part, and she is honestly delightful.

And, once again, I was unable to figure out the murderer. I’ve now read six Agatha Christie novels, and it’s me one, Agatha Christie five. She’s so tricksy, that one. So full of surprises.