Heresy.

I just finished reading Agatha Christie’s Murder at the Vicarage. It’s a good book – the first writing of Jane Marple. Not one of Christie’s best, I think, but still a very enjoyable read.

But the 1986 BBC television adaptation is better. The screenplay, written by TR Bowen and brilliantly acted by Joan Hickson as Miss Marple, is excellent. It is rare for any adaptation of literature to screen to be excellent, much less better then the original, and even rarer with the notoriously hard to adapt writings of Agatha Christie, but somehow, the BBC manages it. Even the worst of the adaptations in this series is still quite good.

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