"Miss Marple Resurfaces, And This Time She's No Spinster"

According to Deadline.com, "Disney has made a deal to revive the Agatha Christie mystery series staple character Miss Marple, but with one big difference: instead of the elderly spinster who lives in the English village of St. Mary's [sic] Mead and solves mysteries as a hobby, the new configuration is for Mark Frost to script a version where Marple is in her 30s or 40s."

That's interesting because I'm adapting an Hercule Poirot mystery for the Dizneee Channel wherein he is a 25-year-old Asian man played by John Cho who can communicate psychically with elephants. He works at the San Diego zoo and solves mysteries in his spare time, when he's not riding his Harley. Also, Veronica Mars makes a bunch of cameos.

Murder On The Orient Express

So a little while ago I confessed that I had never read any Agatha Christie. Yes, yes, it's shocking. But there are only so many hours in a day, my friend, and soon most of those will be spent writing my own season finales to various television shows affected by the writers' strike, which I will then act out alone in my apartment with assorted puppets.

But somehow I managed to find the time to read "Murder on the Orient Express" this weekend, which is *kind of* impressive considering I was drinking one alcoholic beverage every two hours for three days ... (note to self: write to publisher and let them know that some of the paragraphs are kind of blurry). In between sips of Crown Royal I was swept away by the intriguing entanglements of Poirot and Co., thoroughly charmed by the casual old-world racism ("Italians stab! British people do not stab ..."), and the conspiratorial ending.

Since you can read Christie's books, drunk, in about a day, I'll probably read them all. They're extremely fun, and I've wanted to read "A Pocket Full of Rye" ever since I was a kid and my sister left an old paperback edition of it lying around that had a lurid purple cover.

Cheers!