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Rating: 
Summary: Murder stories over dinner
Review: Miss Marple is attending a dinner party at the Bantrys' with 3 other guests this evening: Sir Henry Clithering, retired Comissioner of Scotland Yard; Jane Helier, the actress; and Doctor Lloyd. (Sir Henry, as the Bantrys' houseguest, asked that she be invited, having met her the previous year.) Each of the six dinner guests tells a story during the course of the evening, some mystery to which he or she knows the answer, and the listeners attempt to work out the solution. (Miss Marple wins every time, and baffles the others when she tells her own story.) Only 4 of the six stories appear in this recording, an excellent narration by Joan Hickson (who gave the best performances I've ever seen as Miss Marple). The final pair can be found on her narration of _The Herb of Death and Other Stories_."The Blue Geranium" - Colonel Bantry doesn't believe in ghosts, which is why this story worries him so much; Mrs. Bantry invited Miss Marple at Sir Henry's request, partly because she'll be thankful to see the question settled, if possible. One of the Bantry's friends was married to a complaining invalid, who went in for spiritualism. Then a new medium gave her a prophecy: "Never have blue flowers! The blue primrose, warning; the blue hollyhock, danger; the blue geranium, death." And so it came to pass...or did it? "The Four Suspects" - Sir Henry, before his retirement, undertook to have Dr. Rosen protected from the German secret society he had exposed to the police, but ultimately the society had identified him as a spy, and somehow passed a message to one of the four people in his household who must have killed him. It can't be proved as murder; just an old man falling downstairs. But Sir Henry is troubled, because one of the suspects - the secretary - was one of his own men, put there for safety. How did the society pass the kill order to the assassin in the isolated country house? "The Companion" - Dr. Lloyd's story is a remembrance of his days in the Canary Islands. He remembers a night when he met a beautiful Spanish dancer, and a pair of bland, ordinary, English ladies seeing the world, and being completely mistaken in thinking who would have adventures. The key to this mystery is a point that Christie used in at least 1 other Marple story and one of her novels, incidentally. "The Christmas Tragedy" - Sir Henry protests on behalf of the downtrodden males, since none of the ladies has yet told a story, so Miss Marple takes up the gauntlet. But since she's telling it, the story has a different emphasis than usual. When she first met the young couple, she was convinced that the husband meant to kill his wife for her money, and tried everything she could to prevent it, but in the end, Gladys died. But how did he do it?
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