Greenshaw's Folly

The other evening ITV3 offered us a Miss. Marple mystery of this name, with the folly being a complicated Victorian pile built by a successful entrepreneur, one of the latest batch of mysteries starring Julia McKenzie, which IMBD tells me is a little over four years old, but never before seen by us. At least, there was just the one scene, involving falling off a ladder, which seemed familiar, and usually, when we have seen something before, the familiarity cumulates, so that by the end you more or less remember all of it, which was not the case on this occasion. Perhaps there are other Marple mysteries involving fatal falls from ladders.

But this mystery seemed much too complicated, with the adaptor having stuffed so much stuff into it that it was all rather indigestible. It was all still hanging in the air after over an hour, leaving the redoubtable Miss. Marple very little time to sort it all out. All in all, while a lot of time, effort and skill had gone into the mystery, it fell well short of the standard set by the the best of them.

Given that the Marple stoires as written are not usually that complicated, there is only a modest number of kippers (once known as red herrings, in the bad old days when red food dyes had not been banned by the EC directorate general of health and safety), we thought to take a peek at the original. Perhaps there was not an original? Perhaps Miss. Marple had been intruded into some other story? First stop the companion to look up the name 'Greenshaw', which led us to the volume called 'The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding', this being the title of the first story of the small collection of which 'Greenshaw's Folly' is a perfectly respectable member; a satisfying story which hangs on the single, central error of thinking that the apparent time of the murder was the actual time of the murder. But it does involve Miss. Marple; we do not have an intrusion on our hands. However, it only clocks in at a modest 26 pages, say a page for every five minutes of television time, which is not really enough.

Now the are plenty of Poirot stories of that sort of length which have been stretched into an hour or so of television, but this one had been stretched into an hour and a half or so. The adaptors clearly felt they had to go at it with a will.

One murder becomes three murders, with the very small part of one of the murder victims being made into a much larger part.

We have a whole new story line involving a vicar who is too fond of the booze and who is also in charge of the local orphanage. Maybe a thief as well.

The father, or perhaps the grandfather of the present Greenshaw, the eccentric Miss. Greenshaw, is involved in unethical experiments with orphans in his quest for a polio vaccine. A possibly hot topic when the story was written in 1960 or so, but one which did not find its way into the story as written.

Miss. Greenshaw is made into an eccentric botanist, an eccentric botanist with an interest in extracting interesting chemicals from plants, including one, atropine, which doubles as eye drops and poison. In the story as written she is merely eccentric.

A cute child is stirred into the mix, the child of a marriage which turned violent, with mother and child in hiding, in the folly, from the father. Who finds out about them. Another whole new story line.

On the other hand, Raymond West, Miss. Marple's literary nephew is struck out.

But the adaptors clearly knew all about Agatha's fondness for a quote from the bard, with the all important Greenshaw will being lodged next to Sonnet 3 in a collected edition in the library. In the story as written, a rather elderly but less pretentious thriller is used, 'Lady Audley's Secret'. The upside is that I have got to read, for the first time, this rather moving sonnet.

Perhaps the production team who do 'Midsomer Murders', more overcomplicated and overcooked mysteries, have taken over what is left of the Agatha franchise as part of some economy drive in the world of television production companies.

PS: the last four Poirot stories made with David Suchet, a few years ago now, suffered from the same disease. Overcomplicated and overcooked, with things made worse by the male leads all looking a bit long in the tooth. I think we only managed the first half of the first of the four.

Reference 1: Lady Audley's Secret - Mary Elizabeth Braddon - 1862.