The villagers of Chipping Cleghorn, including Miss Marple, are agog with curiosity over an advertisement in the local gazette which reads: ‘A murder is announced and will take place on Friday, October 29th, at Little Paddocks at 6.30 p.m.’ A childish practical joke? Or a hoax intended to scare poor Letitia Blacklock? Unable to resist the mysterious invitation, a crowd begins to gather at Little Paddocks at the appointed time when, without warning, the lights go out…

This was a very enjoyable read. I liked that it was a novel dominated by collecting and grinding through data to solve who did it and why. Instead, it was a novel lit up by the diverse set of women who lived in the village and were associated with the crime.

At first, I was a little put off by how many of the women declared themselves or were declared by their friends to be stupid. Then I realised that with one charming exception, the ‘Oh, I’m so stupid about such things’ stance was camouflage that hid both secrets and intellects.

I liked that almost all of the characters were likeable to a degree. There was no obvious evil witch in their midst wreaking havoc just ordinary and sometimes admirable women making the best of things, Except for whoever it was who was killing people and even they seemed to be taking no joy in their actions.

This a Miss Marple novel (although she would protest, modestly, that she merely shared a few thoughts and that it was that bright young policeman who solved the crime) and her way of looking at who people really are, her lack of trust in who people present themselves as being and her resigned acceptance that even nice people may find a good reason to do bad things, set the tone for the story.

One consequence of this is that the novel, published in 1950, gives some fascinating details of village life after World War II. How migration had changed the character of the village by adding people who had not grown up there or been introduced by people whom one knew and trusted but who had rather presented themselves and their story on arrival and built their lives anew. How the continuation of rationing had drawn all of the women in the village into an illegal but taken-for-granted barter system that combined intimacy with complicity. How much loss the war had imposed on families, how much dislocation it had caused, and how much change it had driven, particularly in the lives of women. Taken together, these things painted a picture of village life in transition with everyone having to adjust to new and unasked-for realities and, for the most part, supporting one another in muddling through.

For me, this credible, fallible, very human context made the murders into violations that seemed much more unforgivable than the deaths in the Poirot books where it often seems that bad people kill other bad people in clever ways for trivial reasons. In this book, the people do not deserve to die and the killings destroy the murderer’s peace of mind as well as spreading grief throughout the village.

I’ve always preferred Miss Marple to Poirot, She’s scarier than he is but more human. She sees the world clearly and expects very little of it but never descends into bitterness. She hopes that people will do the right thing but has is never surprised when they do the wrong thing or the easy thing instead.

For me, the biggest difference between Marple and Poirot is that, to Marple, murder is not a game. It’s not a puzzle to be solved with the little grey cells. It’s a tragedy in progress, an eruption of evil that must be contained and stopped. The whole novel is coloured by this way of seeing the world and is the richer for it.

The plot was clever, if a little improbable. The explanations all worked although I paid them little attention in the end. I’ll remember the deaths and the grief long after I’ve forgotten the mechanics of the plot.