About fifteen minutes into this I was beginning to think I had seen this
before. The plot felt very familiar. But no as it turned out - what I had
seen was another version of this that was part of the Miss Marple TV shows.
Which is a bit odd as this Agatha Christie book (1961) was not a Miss Marple
mystery. It was one of her standalone mysteries which this prolific author
pumped out along with her Marple's and Poirot's. Her most famous standalone
book written in 1939 was made into a number of film versions under the title
Ten Little Indians - though the original title of the book was even more
politically incorrect. Perhaps the next version will have to be titled Ten
Little Idiots.
Like that book, this one wanders off of Christie's usual path of murder with
a touch of the supernatural. A dying woman gives the priest a list of names
and tells him to take it to the police but before he does the priest is murdered
and a young man (Colin Buchanan - Pascoe in the TV cop show Dalziel and Pascoe)
is found over the body and so becomes suspect number one. In true mystery
fashion he of course has to solve it to absolve himself. This leads him to
Three Witches who think they can murder through spells and in fact all the
people they have put a spell on have died of odd diseases. The story is set
back in the early 1960's which is only obvious by the leather jackets, his
Lennon accent and two early Kink songs played on the juke box.
It takes a long while before this TV movie gets going with a 105 minute running
time but once it does it moves along fine and perhaps because I saw it late
at night I didn't figure out who the killer was though there was a big fat
clue right near the beginning.
