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    Strange Jest and Other Stories
    Unavailable
    Strange Jest and Other Stories
    Unavailable
    Strange Jest and Other Stories
    Audiobook5 hours

    Strange Jest and Other Stories

    Written by Agatha Christie and Isla Blair

    Narrated by Joan Hickson

    3.5/5

    ()

    Unavailable in your country

    Unavailable in your country

    About this audiobook

    First released on cassette tape in 1993, these archive recordings of six short stories from the book Miss Marple’s Final Cases feature Joan Hickson as Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple.

    First, the mystery man in the church with a bullet-wound… then, the riddle of a dead man’s buried treasure… the curious conduct of a caretaker after a fatal riding accident… the corpse and a tape-measure… the girl framed for theft… and the suspect accused of stabbing his wife with a dagger.

    Recorded thirty years ago after the BBC finished filming the series Miss Marple, these final short stories were read by Joan Hickson when she was nearly 87 years old and capture the warmth and nostalgia of a bygone age.

    Due to the archival nature of these recordings, the quality may vary. Newer recordings of Miss Marple’s Final Cases, read by Juliet Stevenson, are also available.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateJul 2, 2007
    ISBN9780007256419
    Unavailable
    Strange Jest and Other Stories
    Author

    Agatha Christie

    Agatha Christie is known throughout the world as the Queen of Crime. Her books have sold over a billion copies in English with another billion in over 70 foreign languages. She is the most widely published author of all time and in any language, outsold only by the Bible and Shakespeare. She is the author of 80 crime novels and short story collections, 20 plays, and six novels written under the name of Mary Westmacott.

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    Reviews for Strange Jest and Other Stories

    3.5/5

    192 ratings8 reviews

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    • 3/5
      Synopsis/blurb...........

      Presented in this collection are: the man found dying in the church sanctuary; the puzzle of Uncle Henry's hidden legacy; the question of the murder with the tape-measure; the curious conduct of the caretaker; the case of Miss Skinner's maid and the baffling mystery of the stabbing of Mrs Rhodes.
      ---------------------
      My take........

      Well after maybe a 35 year hiatus between my last reading of the venerable Dame of Crime Fiction, I thought it was time to head back down to St Mary Mead and see what all the fuss was about.

      The easiest option for me was to have a crack at a few of her Miss Marple short stories and having picked up this charity shop bargain for the humungous sum of 25p when out and about with my wife and youngest daughter on Monday, I decided to bump the dame off.......sorry, bump her up the queue and get started.

      6 stories – 142 pages – 2-3 hours reading time.

      Well I can add another female author to the tally and possibly can tick a box on my silver bingo card for my Vintage Mystery challenge, I will check later. Two bonus plusses.

      Verdict......well I didn't manage to guess the culprit or guilty party or unravel the mystery in any of the tales before the big reveal, so that was good. And AC can certainly paint a vivid picture for you of her characters; in this particular instance a bed-bound spinster.........with a good deal of greyish-yellow hair untidily wound around her head and erupting into curls, the whole thing looked like a bird’s nest of which no self-respecting bird could be proud. So another tick there. Thirdly, most of the stories engaged me and had me speeding along to the end, so I can’t in all honesty feign indifference.

      I think what struck me was how unsympathetic most of her victims and villains all appeared to be. In the case of the hidden legacy, I didn't like old Uncle Henry’s beneficiaries and was half hoping that Miss Marple was unable (or perhaps more entertainingly) unwilling to solve the riddle and therefore deprive the horrible, vile rats of their inheritance. I guess Marple though couldn't possibly dare to fail. There’s something a little bit unappealing to me about someone who has to be shown to be the cleverest person in the room, all the time. She might just be a little too smug and self-satisfied for me to tolerate too much of her. Time will tell; maybe a longer exposure to our elderly spinster’s charms will seduce me and have me swooning helplessly in admiration? The 4.50 from Paddington may seal the deal! I’m prepared to be wooed.

      Last observation, I’m unsure when these were originally written – this collection was originally published in 1979, but there are probably too many servants and mistresses, or gentry-types and underlings for me to want to spend too much time in their company. A bit too dated, a bit too Upstairs-Downstairs, a bit too class conscious and a bit too genteel for me. Each to their own, but I will probably not read too many of her other books.

      Anyway I must dash......tea and scone time in the drawing room, nanny’s just rung the bell.......... yummy – so toodle pips!

      3 from 5

      I bought my copy second-hand recently.
    • 3/5
      A collection of short stories, some of which don't feature Miss Marple at all. There are some good ones though, like "The Case of the Caretaker", in which a local bad boy who had to leave the village due to his behavior returns years later with a new, wealthy bride. The couple is relentlessly harassed by an old woman but no one can figure out why.My least favorite was "Strange Jest", which features one of Christie's rich old uncles who enjoys playing games with his will. There are two stories in the collection that involve the supernatural rather than criminals, and one story in which Miss Marple is the narrator, which I don't remember her doing elsewhere. I was worried by the title of this book that she'd be killed off here but it didn't happen.
    • 3/5
      Miss Marple is one of those wonderful characters that I can see and hear whenever reading her mysteries. These final cases, 6 short stories, are by today's standards simple mysteries. There's no technical gadgetry, hardly even a telephone! No fast cars or high speed chases. No brutal attacks on anyone, apart from the murder, and that happens quietly, without a gory, blood and guts description of the deed. Reading this was like watching something from the black and white days of television. I remember watching Margaret Rutherford play the part of Miss Marple and for me, no other actress comes close to my imagined persona and the clever writing by Agatha Christie still manages to intrigue and surprise, even in the 21st century.
    • 3/5
      Ideal bed time reading - the stories are written well enough to draw you in, but are short and formulaic enough to not keep you up all night guessing what happened next.

      Some of the stories are more obvious than others. Unlike in the The Thirteen Problems, there is no particular thread to collection - and no story line within the collection to reveal more about Miss Marple (or why the collection is titled Final Cases). For that, 3 stars, not more.

      I guess, if Christie had been able alive to have an input in the editing and collating of the stories it might have turned out better, but this was published to provide a final fix for Marple enthusiasts.

      So, if you are considering picking up a Marple story for the first time, don't start with this one.
    • 3/5
      8 short stories, the first 6 of which are classic Miss Marple. Very enjoyable! The last two are slightly eerie and don't feature Miss Marple at all.
    • 4/5
      Collection of short stories, mostly featuring Miss Marple and not previously published in the UK. Miss Marple applies her brain to various problems, not all of them murder - she helps a young couple find their inheritance. There are a couple of Gothic short stories at the end - 'A Dressmaker's Doll' is particularly creepy. A fine book on which to end the Marple series.
    • 3/5
      I don`t own a copy of this, but having read it recently, thought a review might be appropriate.The title of this collection is slightly misleading, as the book contains six `Miss Marple` short stories and two tales of the supernatural.For my money, the best of the Marples here is Sanctuary, a story with a little more depth than the others. The others are a mixed bunch, with some being quite weak. Especially annoying in one or two is the tendency of Christie`s ageing sleuth to solve cases by recourse to facts not known to the reader. Perhaps we shouldn`t be too hard on her though, as this was not unusual in very early detective fiction.The two supernatural tales, The Dressmaker`s Doll and Though A Glass Darkly, are very good efforst that any author might feel happy to have penned.Overall, confirmed my view that Christie`s work, whilst sometimes flawed, is not as one-dimensional as her critics would have you believe.
    • 4/5
      Eight of Agatha Christie's short stories. While most of them feature Miss Marple, the final two stories are supernatural tales.This is a good collection for any Miss Marple fan, but be aware that the title is somewhat misleading. The stories were originally published between 1934 and 1959; Dame Agatha continued to publish Miss Marple stories and novels right through to the early 70's. It would be more appropriate to call this A Sampling of Miss Marple.All the stories appear in other collections, too; the only ones I was not already familiar with were "Miss Marple Tells A Story," (a delightful mystery written in the first person, from Miss Marple's perspective), and "In A Glass Darkly," (one of the supernatural stories, and a durned good one at that).But despite the fact that you can get all these stories elsewhere, this is still a solid collection. The stories make good use of Miss Marple's trademark logic. If they occasionally hinge on some sort of coincidence... well, that's another one of Aunt Jane's trademarks, and at least Christie deals with it in an entertaining fashion. Miss Marple's coincidental knowledge comes not from some sort of deus ex machina, but rather from her longtime observation of human nature.Overall: good stuff. Worth checking out if you don't own many of Agatha Christie's short story collections or if you're a big Miss Marple fan.