As Miss Marple sat basking in the Caribbean sunshine, she felt mildly discontented with life. True, the warmth eased her rheumatism, but here in paradise nothing ever happened.

Eventually, her interest was aroused by an old soldier’s yarn about a murderer he had known. Infuriatingly, just as he was about to show her a snapshot of this acquaintance, the Major was suddenly interrupted. A diversion that was to prove fatal.

‘A Caribbean Mystery‘ deviates from the normal pattern of Jane Marple mysteries. She has left her small English village behind. Scotland Yard is not involved, nor is there really a police investigation into the death that Jane suspects was murder. Jane, courtesy of her rich nephew, is spending some weeks at a small resort hotel on a Caribbean island. The hotel, which is a collection of bungalows by the sea, is run by a young English couple who have recently bought the place. The guests are all monied white people who are mostly strangers to each other and who know nothing of Jane Marple’s reputation for solving murders.

This context allows Jane Marple to assume her camouflage as a quiet old lady who listens well and knits incessantly as she observes the people around her with a clinical accuracy that is nothing like intimacy. The other guests include two pleasure-seeking thirty-something couples, a vicar and his unmarried sister, a retired military man who thinks he’s a raconteur but is actually a bore and a very rich, very rude, very old man and his small staff. 

I always enjoy spending time with Jane Marple. I like her self-awareness and her quiet but relentless analysis of the behaviour and relationships of the people around her. The mystery in this novel was a little thin and I felt Christie came close to cheating on the way information was presented but I didn’t care because the characters, including Jane, were so engaging.

Jane’s observations on the invisibility of old women made me smile, as did her reflections on how the young people in 1964 seem to believe that their generation invented sex and infidelity whereas they simply talked about it more than had been the case when Jane was young. I enjoyed learning that the young Jane Marple had once almost married a man but was glad that things hadn’t worked out because, while he was viewed by her parents as a suitable match, Jane eventually came to realise he was very dull.

The plot revolves around the death, apparently from natural causes, of a guest who had been telling Jane and anyone else who would listen to his rambling, repetitive, clearly embroidered tales, about a murderer he’d once met. Jane believes that the guest was murdered to keep him silent and so starts to reassess the people around her. 

In the world, as Jane sees it, it’s clear that men tend to wrap themselves in self-serving fantasies that become the stories they tell themselves and others about who they are, while women compromise with reality and mostly stay silent about the things that they don’t like but can’t change.

One of the things I liked most about the book was the chemistry between Jane and the grumpy millionaire whom everyone else is slightly afraid of. He is the only one who sees through Jane’s camouflage and recognises her for the insightful woman that she is. She, in turn, sees past his abrasive bluntness and sees a man close to death who knows what he wants and expects to get it but who is still capable of being quietly kind. I enjoyed watching the two of them forge an alliance to solve the murder.