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| from agathachristie.com |
" 'Why didn't they ask Evans?' " Bobby repeated the phrase thoughtfully. 'You know, I can't see what on earth there can be in that to put the wind up anybody.' 'Ah! That's because you don't know. It's like making crossword puzzles. You write down a clue and you think it's too idiotically simple and that everyone will guess it straight off, and you're frightfully surprised when they simply can't get it in the least. 'Why didn't they ask Evans?' must have been a frightfully significant phrase to them, and they couldn't realize that it meant nothing at all to you.' " - Bobby and Frankie, Why Didn't They Ask Evans, p. 59
The Sum of It:
Bobby Jones (not the professional golfer, but instead a village vicar's organ-playing son), while playing golf (badly) with a pal, discovers a nearly-dead body who seems to have tumbled over a cliff in the fog. Bobby, while tending to the body as his friend ran for help, takes in the man's cryptic last words: "Why didn't they ask Evans?"
Bobby chalks it up to the man having fallen off a cliff and just assumes he's not making any sense. However he happens to see a photograph of a hauntingly beautiful lady in the man's pocket, and hopes the police can use that to find the man's next of kin once he is deceased (leaving a handsome, tanned, outdoor-adventurer looking corpse). Bobby, late to play the organ for his father's church service, is super relieved when a guy named Bassinton-ffrench (spelled that way, not a typo, #ohBritishpeople) wanders up and offers to sit with the corpse til help arrives so Bobby can go to church.
Bobby is shocked upon attending the inquest for the man's death to see a woman, claiming to be the dead man's sister, who was allegedly identified based on the photo found in the man's pocket. She looks nothing like pocket-photo-lady (upon whom dear Bobby developed a bit of a crush)! This woman identifies the body as her brother, a man named Pritchard. Bobby laments what age can do to one, chalking up the lady's new appearance to bad makeup. Later when he's riding the train with his friend Lady Frances Derwent (aka Frankie), she gets all excited about this difference, thinking that ooooh there might be a bit of a mystery here! Bobby pooh-poohs the idea UNTIL he's snoozing by a river with a bottle of beer at hand, falls asleep and wakes up in the hospital with MORPHIA poisoning! An unsuccessful attempt has been made on Bobby's life (as Frankie says, "Only, having a most extraordinary inside or something, it didn't kill him.") NOW he and Frankie are sure that whoever killed the man allegedly called Pritchard thinks Bobby knows something, and is after him too. So they set about to solve the mystery, starting with ol' Bassington-ffrench, who is the only person who could have changed out the pocket photo.
They determine that B-ff, a member of an aristocratic family, lives in a country house with his brother, sister-in-law, and their kid. Frankie decides to fake a car crash into their gates to gain admittance to the house so she can spy on them all from the inside. Once there, she meets a super creepy doctor, his spooky wife, makes Bobby pretend to be her chauffeur, and they all decide a different person has to be alternately innocent/guilty every other chapter. All along, they simply cannot figure out WHO IS EVANS?! This mystery literally takes to the very end to figure out, but they know that if they figure out who Evans is, and what context in which this person wasn't asked something, they will have found the key to the cliff-guy's death. Only after being locked in an attic do they sort it all out (and #fallinlove).
This one is engrossing and so fun to read! It's another in the line of caper-style mysteries, bringing us some charming bon-mots and dual thinking-through of the evidence to resolution. Definitely recommend!
The YOA Treatment:
As noted in a previous post, I (Emily) insisted on reading this one because it's one of my favorite television adaptations, albeit altered into a Miss Marple story for TV. As we've seen with a few of the others that have made their way to the screen, the plots and characters sometimes get a bit altered for a different format, and this one is no different. While the adorable, crime-solving pseudo couple, Bobby Jones and Lady Frances Derwent (aka Frankie) is still present and up their mystery solving shenanigans, the bad guys and side characters are a bit jumbled up in this one.
I think this is largely because sometimes Dame Agatha created these complex webs of characters in effort to throw all us readers off, when she was really totally overestimating our intelligence and we still would have been just as stumped with one set of mysterious people rather than three #wegetityouaresmarter #noneedtoshowoffAgatha. This plot is really clever, and we find that some of the red herrings are FAKE red herrings, and in fact are the real deal after all, which is a great type of plot twist.
The TV adaptation is organized into a real creep-fest, complete with a main family named Savage (in the book the Savages are tangential, though significant, to the plot), basically a haunted house, two creepy teenage kids (one of whom has an enormous pet snake that he really likes freaking people out with), a drug-addled mom (there is a drug-addled character in the book, but it's a different family member), cruel and mysterious father, random visiting piano teacher who thinks he's smooth (his character in the book is Bassington-ffrench), and a creepy orchid-grower who is literally from out of the blue. While there's definitely some creepiness and haunted-house aspects of this story, the creative liscense used in the Miss Marple TV adaptation definitely added some drama and darkness to an already great tale. We recommend BOTH #doublefeature! Which do you like best??
-E.
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