A Caribbean Mystery

Conversations are always dangerous, if you have something to hide.

Lie is more worth living, more full of interest when you are likely to lose it. It shouldn't be, perhaps, but it is. When you're young and strong and healthy, and life stretches ahead of you, living isn't really important at all. It's young people who commit suicide easily, out of despair from love, sometimes from sheer anxiety and worry. But old people know how valuable life is and how interesting. - Jane Marple

The truth must be quite plain, if one could just clear away the litter.

The truth is, that one doesn't really know anything about anybody. Not even the people who are nearest to you...' 'Isn't that going a little too far--exaggerating too much?' 'I don't think it is. When you think of people, it is in the image you have made of them for yourself.

It's all very well to talk like that,” said Mr. Rafiel. “We, you say? What do you think I can do about it? I can't even walk without help. How can you and I set about preventing a murder? You're about a hundred and I'm a broken-up old crock.

They found he’d had a lethal dose of something that only a doctor could pronounce properly. As far as I remember it sounds vaguely like di-flor, hexagonal-ethylcarbenzol. That’s not the right name. But that’s roughly what it sounds like.

People bicker so and have such rows. Even if they're fond of each other, they still seem to have rows and not to mind a bit whether they have them in public or not.

IF anybody had been there to observe the gentle-looking elderly lady who stood meditatively on the loggia outside her bungalow, they would have thought she had nothing more on her mind than deliberation on how to arrange her time that day. An expedition, perhaps, to Castle Cliff; a visit to Jamestown; a nice drive and lunch at Pelican Point_ or just a quiet morning on the beach. But the gentle old lady was deliberating quite other matters. She was in a militant mood.

He had had a lonely life and a lonely death. But it had been the kind of loneliness that spends itself in living amongst people, and in passing the time that way not unpleasantly. Major Palgrave might have been a lonely man, he had also been quite a cheerful one.

Like many old people she slept lightly and had periods of wakefulness which she used for the planning of some action or actions to be carried out on the next or following days.

Modern novels. So difficult—all about such unpleasant people, doing such very odd things and not, apparently, even enjoying them. “Sex” as a word had not been mentioned in Miss Marple’s young days; but there had been plenty of it—not talked about so much—but enjoyed far more than nowadays, or so it seemed to her. Though usually labelled Sin, she couldn’t help feeling that that was preferable to what it seemed to be nowadays—a kind of Duty.

But it wasn’t really scandals Miss Marple wanted. Nothing to get your teeth into in scandals nowadays. Just men and women changing partners, and calling attention to it, instead of trying decently to hush it up and be properly ashamed of themselves.

How can you and I set about preventing a murder? You're about a hundred and I'm a broken-up old crock.

This morning Miss Marple lay thinking soberly and constructively of murder, and what, if her suspicions were correct, she could do about it.

A more sensitive man than Canon Prescott might have felt that he was de trop.