The Murder at the Vicarage

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Protheroe is dead in the vicarage study, and the man who finds him is the vicar. That is awkward for everybody, not least because half of St Mary Mead had said out loud at some point that the world would be better without him. The vicar had said it himself.

This is the Audible Original full-cast version, with Toni Collette playing Miss Marple and Kit Harington as the vicar, and it runs to just over four hours. It is a dramatisation rather than a reading, so there is a script, a cast of more than a dozen and an original score, and it moves at the speed of a good radio play.

A village where everyone has a reason

The obvious suspects present themselves almost immediately. Protheroe's beautiful young wife Anne, and Lawrence Redding, the handsome artist she is said to be involved with. Both of them behave exactly as guilty people behave, which in Christie is never a good sign for the reader who takes it at face value.

Behind them the village fills up with alternatives. Lettice, the daughter, stands to inherit a fortune. Dr Stone, an archaeologist, tells a story that does not quite hold together. Mrs Lestrange has arrived from nowhere and nobody can say a single true thing about her. Even the vicar's own wife cannot be ruled out. St Mary Mead looks like a place where nothing happens, and the plot's real argument is that this is exactly what it is designed to look like.

Miss Marple is the only one who sees it. Not because she is cleverer at fingerprints, but because she has watched this village for fifty years and knows that people are versions of other people she has already met. Once she starts paying attention to someone, the polite surface comes off entirely.

The cast is the reason to pick this one

Toni Collette as Miss Marple is an unexpected piece of casting and a defensible one. Marple is usually played warm and twinkly, and Collette's range runs colder than that, which suits a character whose main quality is that she assumes the worst about people and is right. Kit Harington takes the vicar, who narrates the original novel and is the audience's way into the village.

Around them the list is long and genuinely stacked: Jasmine Jobson, Calam Lynch, Eliot Salt, Honor Swinton-Byrne, Katy Wix, Lolly Adefope, Leo Reich, Billy Postlethwaite, Hugh Dennis, Alex Jennings, Kathryn Drysdale, Kurt Egyiawan, La Voix, Meera Syal and Vicki Pepperdine. Pepperdine, BAFTA-nominated as a writer and comedian, also wrote the adaptation, which shows in how quickly the village gossip lands as comedy rather than exposition.

The production has an original score by Wasia Project and is available in Dolby Atmos on Audible. With this many voices in one drawing room that matters more than it sounds. Separating a dozen characters by ear is the whole technical problem of a full-cast mystery, and the mix does the work.

Where this one sits in the Marple books

The Murder at the Vicarage is where Miss Marple starts. Agatha Christie had used her in magazine short stories from 1927, but this was the first full novel built around her, published by the Collins Crime Club in 1930. Everything the character became was set here: the village, the knitting, the deceptively harmless manner, and the habit of solving a murder by comparing the suspects to people she once knew locally.

Christie went on to write eleven more Marple novels across the following decades, so if this works for you there is a long shelf waiting. It is also a sensible entry point for anyone who has only met Marple through television, because nothing here depends on having read the others.

Four hours, a cast this size and the first appearance of the most famous amateur detective in English fiction. If you want to know whether a full-cast Christie is for you, this is the one to test it on, and the Audible trial covers it.