A different Miss Marple is back on the case

There is something deeply satisfying about watching British period mystery shows, beyond the usual pleasures of the solved puzzle and trapped villain. There is the particular joy of being transported to another place and time -- and there is enough of old England still around that this transportation can be very convincing, at least to American eyes. And there is the habitual interlocking of comedy and tragedy in an attitude that seems at once amused and appalled at the human condition. In some ways the nation and the genre seem synonymous.

And so what Charles Dickens is to Christmas, Agatha Christie may to be to crime; with literally billions sold. Only Shakespeare and the Bible are said to outsell her, and it’s a safe bet she’s more often read from start to finish.

It’s no surprise, then, that Christie fans take her texts as a kind of holy writ, nor that the latest iteration of the Marple franchise -- four two-part movie-length adaptations, starring Geraldine McEwan (“Mapp & Lucia”) and beginning here Sunday night on the PBS series “Mystery!,” the ancient home of British mystery in America -- caused something of a stir when it aired last year in Britain. In one galling instance, the adapters went so far as to change the guilty party -- I won’t say which film, as it makes it too easy to work out the solution -- a switch that also involved making two straight characters gay. It comes very late in the story, has no substantial effect on the otherwise faithful adaptation that precedes it and works just about as well as the original -- certainly, it’s more dramatic -- but it’s enough to give pause even to a viewer not familiar with the book.

They have also given Jane Marple the hint of “a past” -- not “psychological motivation,” thank heaven, but a sense that there had been more to her life than knitting, gardening and solving crime; that her insight has been earned, and is based upon a kind of sympathy for her fellow human beings rather than a freakish Holmesian eye for detail. These alterations are not really necessary, but they aren’t fatal either, and no less credible on the whole than the highly convoluted plots Christie’s killers tend to hatch.

The movies have, after all, long had their way with Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett and Ian Fleming -- sometimes for the better. “Hamlet” is no worse for wear for centuries of reinterpretation, or for being based on a story already in circulation before Shakespeare got hold of it. (And doubtless there were some then who didn’t like what he did with it.) License is inevitable, even desirable, in adaptation, and these are lively, well-made films that (at around two hours per) have ample time to develop ambience and character.

Previous Marples include the tank-like Margaret Rutherford, who starred in four knockabout film comedies in the early ‘60s, only one of which was actually based on a Marple book (two were adapted from Poirot novels, of all things, and one was wholly original); Angela Lansbury, who would go on to portray the Marple-y Jessica Fletcher on “Murder, She Wrote”; and Helen Hayes, who had already played a similar role in NBC’s “Snoop Sisters.” But it’s the work of Joan Hickson, who between 1984 and 1992 starred in BBC adaptations of all 12 of the Marple novels, that dominates the minds of Christiephiles and against which the less obviously formidable McEwan will be measured.

I happen to like her, but then I had no problem with Rutherford either. Where Hickson’s Marple was tweedy and sober and almost aristocratic, McEwan is twinkly and elfin and a little eccentric. Her interpretation does fair justice to Christie’s double-description of her as outwardly “fluttering and dithering” but possessing “a mind that has plumbed the depths of human iniquity and taken it as all in the day’s work.” A sort of jolly skeptic -- “Most people believe what’s told them,” she says, “whereas I never do” -- McEwan’s Marple is also perhaps a little more modern than usual: She dances and drinks Scotch and nothing human is alien to her, and though she wades into dark matters of life and death, she seems to enjoy herself enormously. (“How clever!” she says to herself, when she suddenly understands how a murder was done, dropping her voice to add, “How wicked!”) Similarly, the drab palette of the more naturalistic Hickson Marples gives way here to a more colorful, more cinematic look, with a gloss at times reminiscent of the movies of their midcentury setting. It is also colorfully cast, with a panoply of actors whose faces are familiar even when the names are not. The better known include Derek Jacobi, David Warner, James Fox, Ian Richardson, Miriam Margolyes, Jane Asher and Herbert Lom. Especially splendid are Zoe Wanamaker, in “A Murder Is Announced,” on the tragic end, and Joanna Lumley, of “Ab Fab,” on the comic.

*

‘Miss Marple -- The Murder at the Vicarage’

Where: KCET

When: 9 p.m. Sundays

Ratings: TV-PG-S (may be unsuitable for young children with advisory for sex)

Geraldine McEwan...Miss Marple

Derek Jacobi...Col. Protheroe

Executive producers Michele Buck, Damien Timmer, Rebecca Eaton. Screenplay Stephen Churchett. Director Charles Palmer.