It was more prominent in the novel, but its lack of necessity here is obvious. (For example, the secondary priest subplot is reduced to an obligatory afterthought here. This results in far too many smug reaction shots, far too many exchanges of dialogue dripping with 'significance', far too many scenes which could have been cut to a few lines of dialogue, freeing up the pace for more insightful exchanges elsewhere. They didn't, and it makes the necessarily hurried plot revelations seem even more so. The writers needed to capture the leisurely and still foreboding small village atmosphere early on. This is never easy, but it has often been done successfully. True, a 200+ page novel had to be condensed into one hour and 42 minutes.

Joan Hickson is most probably the Miss Marple that Agatha Christie envisioned - more so than Margaret Rutherford or Helen Hayes, for example, but the rest of the production is not. And while the original novel does this as well, it doesn't spring things on us totally out of the blue. The script is rather heavy-handed, moving quickly from one incident to another with little or no set-up. Here, Miss Marple is used to being involved, and police are used to consulting her, however much they resent having to do so. This edition was evidently produced later in the series. Murder at the Vicarage was Agatha's Christie's first adventure with Miss Marple. The underlying problem with this version of Murder at the Vicarage is that the producers took it out of order.

A murder at the vicarage