Joan Hickson- The Tuesday Club Murders by Agatha Christie

The Tuesday Night Club A group of friends are meeting at the house of Miss Marple in St Mary Mead. As well as the old lady herself, there is her nephew – the writer Raymond West – the artist Joyce Lemprière, Sir Henry Clithering (a former Scotland Yard commissioner), a clergyman called Dr Pender, and Mr Petherick, a solicitor. The conversation turns to unsolved mysteries; Raymond, Joyce, Pender, and Petherick all claim that their professions are ideal for solving crimes. Joyce suggests that they form a club; every Tuesday night, a member of the group must tell of a real mystery, and the others will attempt to solve it. Sir Henry agrees to participate, and Miss Marple brightly volunteers herself to round out the group. Sir Henry tells the first story of three people who sat down to a supper after which all of them fell ill, supposedly of food poisoning, and one died as a result. The three people were a Mr and Mrs Jones and the wife's companion, Miss Clark, and it was Mrs Jones who died. Mr Jones was a commercial traveller; a maid in one of the hotels in which he stayed saw blotting paper he had used to write a letter, whose decipherable phrases referred to his dependency on his wife's money, her death, and "hundreds and thousands". The maid read of the death in a paper and, knowing relatives in the same village where Mr and Mrs Jones lived, wrote to them. This started a chain of gossip which led to the exhumation of the body and the discovery that Mrs Jones was poisoned with arsenic. There was further gossip linking Mr Jones to the doctor's daughter, but there was nothing substantive there. The Jones's maid, Gladys, tearfully confirmed that all three people had been served the same meal of tinned lobster, bread and cheese, and trifle. She had also prepared a bowl of cornflour for Mrs Jones to calm her stomach, but Miss Clark ate this, despite the diet she was on for her consistent weight problems. Jones also had a plausible explanation for the letter which was blotted in the hotel room. The people in the room deliver their various theories as to who the murderer is, but neglect to ask Miss Marple, until Sir Henry politely points out the omission. Miss Marple witters on about a similar case involving a local family (to which Raymond cannot see any relevance) until she suddenly asks Sir Henry if Gladys confessed, and says that she hopes Mr Jones will hang for what he made the poor girl do. The letter in the hotel room was to Gladys. Hundreds and thousands refers to sweets sprinkled atop the dessert; Mr Jones had mixed arsenic with them and given them to Gladys to use for the trifle. Miss Clark had not eaten the dessert (due to her diet) and Mr Jones scraped off the poisoned sweets. Sir Henry confirms that Miss Marple is correct. Mr Jones had got Gladys pregnant and used a promise of marriage after his wife's death to persuade the girl to commit murder. He then married someone else. The baby died shortly after its birth and Gladys confessed while dying.