Christie, Agatha: Caribbean Mystery, A (radio play)

Since we first met Mr. Rafiel of Nemesis in A Carribean Mystery, I listed to that next. This is the one where an old bore asks Miss Marple if she wants to see a photograph of a murderer, stops before showing it her with a startled look on his face, and then ends dead. I don’t recommend experiencing these out of order; Miss Marple doesn’t ally with Mr. Rafiel until late in the book, and Nemesis has oblique but real spoilers for this story.

On its own, though, I’d be a bit dubious about this, as the big revelation that makes the mystery come together doesn’t seem physically plausible to me. Other than Mr. Rafiel, there isn’t too much memorable about this. (I do note that a sort of rough justice occurs with regard to one of the red herrings, which goes unremarked upon by the characters in the adaptation.)

No Comments

Christie, Agatha: Nemesis (radio play)

I picked Agatha Christie’s Nemesis nearly at random of my “audiobooks” playlist; I’d recorded it a while ago and didn’t remember a thing about the premise. So it was a nice surprise to find a strong opening hook: Jason Rafiel, who Miss Marple met on a prior case, has died, leaving her a large sum of money—if she’ll solve a mystery for him. He’s not going to tell her about the mystery, but information will come her way, and their code word will be “Nemesis,” which is a reference to the prior case. (Of course, in the radio play at least, no-one ever uses a code word, so it feels rather contrived.)

At this point, I was quite interested, but as the adaptation continued, I began to have some misgivings about this premise. Mr. Rafiel posthumously maneuvers Miss Marple into places where she can learn about the mystery, forcing her to find out everything herself, and I found myself tempted to conflate him with the author—and then I got annoyed with him and Christie for withholding information and making us jump through hoops. It’s hard to tell from the adaptation how much Mr. Rafiel knew or suspected about the mystery; maybe he guessed a lot and was directing Miss Marple accordingly, or maybe he was just spectacularly lucky.

This is probably one that’s better read, though for subtler reasons than the my previous quibbles with the adaptations for radio.

No Comments