The Geraldine McEwan era of ITV’s ‘Agatha Christie’s Marple’ begins! Library Murder with Geraldine McEwan’s Miss Marple Geraldine McEwan's Marple would have celebrated the Relief of Mafeking by drinking 10 Bacardi Breezers and getting her tits out in Trafalgar Square.Please feel free to comment on my review. The real crime was to kill Miss Marple and replace her with a Generation X view of what a little old lady should be like. This is not the real crime of the makers - admittedly it takes hubris to tinker with Christie's logic but there is no reason not to challenge or tease the audience. Fuss has been made about changing the ending of this and other novels. It undoes Christie's aim of reminding us that even very ordinary people can do wonderful things, and shows immense disrespect for a generation of people and a vanished way of life.
Of course, the effect is to negate Christie's feat of imagination, by turning a remarkably unremarkable character into an unremarkably remarkable one. Presumably these character changes are to make her 'relevant' for modern audiences. Christie's Miss Marple would hardly have taken revelations of lesbianism in her stride she was never unshockable and never approved of metropolitan ways. It is hinted that she has had an affair, as if sexual experience was necessary to make someone a whole person. The essential 'Miss' is dropped in favour of the modern-sounding 'Marple'. The only thing that marked her out was her understanding of human evil. She was genteel, polite, cultivated, gossipy, nosy, unprepossessing, feminine, politically incorrect, conservative and traditional. Persistently underestimated, she proves herself wiser than more worldly characters - the police of course, but also her annoying nephew Raymond West, various carers and others.
The point of Miss Marple, Agatha Christie's brilliant concept, was to make her a member of the most disregarded and voiceless species of human being - the elderly spinster. With the exception of the BBC series with Joan Hickson, film-makers struggle with Miss Marple.
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