Teresa Reviews “The Tragedy at Marsdon Manor” (1991)
Fidelity to text: 3 rook rifles
An entire rook flock of additions fluttered in, but most of them were suggested by the story itself.
Quality of movie on its own: 4 1/2 rook rifles
We really enjoyed this one, especially the added innkeeper. He flew in from an entirely different flock, the one that Ariadne Oliver flies with.
Read more of Teresa’s Agatha Christie movie reviews at Peschel Press.
Also, follow Teresa’s discussion of these movies on her podcast.
Let’s start with rooks. If you only know chess, you might wonder what those fluttering black birds are and why the gardener is carrying what looks like a shrunken .22 rifle. Those birds are rooks, a member of the corvid family, similar to crows and ravens. Like crows and ravens, rooks are smart, noisy, flocking birds. You rarely see one rook. There are plenty more roosting in the tree overhead. The rifle is to shoot them, one by one, using tiny bullets. Rook shooting is a classic and common British blood-sport that keeps down crop-damaging vermin and — if you’re hungry or thrifty — you eat the rooks that were eating your crops.
The tiny caliber makes rook rifles useful for shooting rabbits. Juvenile rooks and rabbits supposedly make a very nice pie, not that I’ve ever eaten one. Rabbit can be darn good eating so why not young rooks as well? We forget in these times of splendid largesse available at every supermarket that meat in ye olden days could be hard to come by. It was valued enough to go to the trouble of cleaning birds the size of your hand so you could get a mouthful of delicious protein.
The other point behind the rook rifle, common on every British estate, is that the bullet is tiny. I mean pea-sized. It doesn’t have a lot of power behind it, which is why the victim can be shot in the mouth, the bullet lodge in the brain, and there’s no dramatic, impossible-to-miss exit wound to excite the local police. There’s nothing to see but a mouthful of blood. If you’re shooting tiny game like rooks, rabbits, and squirrels, a bigger caliber will destroy what little meat there is. You’d be better off netting the critters.
Thus, Johnathan Maltravers is found dead under the haunted tree, a mouthful of blood the only indication of what killed him. He’s got a much, much younger hot blonde wife who paints in her copious spare time. Susan Maltravers sure isn’t providing him with a much-needed heir to inherit Marsdon manor which is a primary reason childless old men marry young hotties.
Johnathan Maltravers also has a long-time secretary managing the estate for him. It’s implied that Miss Rawlinson has loved Maltravers for decades but alas, she’s plain and suffers from resting bitch face so he never noticed her devotion. It’s very noticeable that Miss Rawlinson, while remaining polite, does not like Mrs. Maltravers.
Under normal circumstances, Poirot would have read about the tragic accidental death of Maltravers in the newspaper and that would have been that. But alas for the would-be murderer, another would-be murder-solver had already written to Poirot, begging for help with serious crimes.
Poirot and Hastings hastily read the letter, skipping the boring parts, and rush down to the quaint village rife with unsolvable murders. They meet Mr. Naughton, innkeeper, who is utterly overjoyed to have the famous Hercule Poirot come to his rescue.
It turns out to be a good thing that he did. Poirot checks the body, speaks with Mrs. Maltravers, meets Miss Rawlinson, and then Captain Black, visitor from Kenya. He also speaks to Dr. Bernard who was shocked that Maltravers died. He’d had some health issues, it was true, but the good doctor expected him to live for many years to come. Poirot then suggests to Chief Inspector Japp that this body needs an autopsy and surprise, surprise.
The pathologist discovers that Mr. Maltravers didn’t die from a hemorrhage caused by his ulcer. He died because someone shot him inside his mouth with a very small caliber gun. Could it have been suicide? His estate was in arrears and he’d recently taken out a £50,000 pound life insurance policy with hot, young, blonde Susan as his beneficiary. Except Susan appears to be a devoted, grieving, superstitious wife. She claims that ghosts haunted the estate and it must have been one of them who scared Maltravers to death. Somehow. Further proving that these are ghosts uniquely able to handle physical objects, Susan is further menaced — in the middle of a crowd — by a poisoned gas mask.
Who would want to harm lovely, widowed, and potentially very rich Susan? Was it the mysterious Captain Black who tried to flee back to Kenya? He gave Susan a disturbing piece of Kenyan art. Could it be Miss Rawlinson who makes her disapproval very plain? It’s probably not the innkeeper as his murders are all on paper. It wasn’t Mr. Maltravers. He’s lying on a slab in the morgue and as we all know, ghosts can scare people to death but they can’t actually handle firearms or gas masks.
Poirot knows who did it, but he has no proof. Susan invites him and Hastings to dinner, along with Captain Black because she’s too afraid to be left in Marsdon manor alone. Voices at the windows, faces in the shrubbery, blood smeared across her dressing room table. Someone’s got it in for her and she needs help. This leads to an impromptu séance in which, yes, ghosts do come back to confront the guilty party.
Justice triumphs again and all because Poirot didn’t carefully read the letter the innkeeper wrote to him, asking for help with his plot. The innkeeper helps solve the murder and then Poirot generously solves his fictional crime as well. In a plot point worthy of Ariadne Oliver, Poirot suggests that the bedridden African explorer shoots a poisoned dart into the fruitcake, thus poisoning the victims.
This is fun episode. It’s got great lines, comeuppances for villains and Poirot alike, lovelorn explorers confronting reality (a scene that should have been longer), high drama, ghosts, and watercolors that serve as clues. Don’t miss this one.
