The Blood-Stained Pavement: A Miss Marple Short Story

By Agatha Christie

A classic Agatha Christie short story, featuring Miss Marple, from the collection Miss Marple: The Complete Short Stories.

Joyce Lempiere tells the Tuesday Night Club of an incident that occurred five years ago when she was vacationing at a small inn on the Cornish coast. She was painting a picture of the front of the inn, including details of wet bathing suits drying on the balcony of Denis and Margery Dacre, when she realised she had included blood stains on the pavement. A few days later Margery is found dead, having drowned, and the Club are called to solve the mystery.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: May 8, 2012
• ISBN: 9780062211002

Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie is the most widely published author of all time, outsold only by the Bible and Shakespeare. Her books have sold more than a billion copies in English and another billion in a hundred foreign languages. She died in 1976, after a prolific career spanning six decades.

Book preview

The Blood-Stained Pavement

A Miss Marple Short Story

by Agatha Christie

An Imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

Contents

Cover

Title Page

The Blood-Stained Pavement

About the Author

Back Ads

Copyright

About the Publisher

The Blood-Stained Pavement

‘The Blood-Stained Pavement’ was first published in The Royal Magazine, March 1928, and in the USA as ‘Drip! Drip!’ in Detective Story Magazine, 23 June 1928.

‘It’s curious,’ said Joyce Lemprière, ‘but I hardly like telling you my story. It happened a long time ago – five years ago to be exact – but it’s sort of haunted me ever since. The smiling, bright, top part of it – and the hidden gruesomeness underneath. And the queer thing is that the sketch I painted at the time has become tinged with the same atmosphere. When you look at it first it is just a rough sketch of a little steep Cornish street with the sunlight on it. But if you look long enough at it something sinister creeps in. I have never sold it but I never look at it. It lives in the studio in a corner with its face to the wall.

‘The name of the place was

Reviews for The Blood-Stained Pavement

[julesjones_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is a 2-CD audiobook of the first five stories from the Miss Marple collection "The Thirteen Problems", read by the late, great Joan Hickson, who played Marple on tv in the 80s and 90s. In each story, a small group of friends gathers together each Tuesday night, and spend part of the evening with one member telling the story of a mystery they encountered, and the others trying to work out what actually happened. Miss Marple, of course, is always the one to solve the puzzle, by drawing on parallels she has seen in village life down the years.Hickson's reading is an absolute joy to listen to, not only because she is Miss Marple for myself and many other fans, but because she is a superb reader. Her reading is perfectly paced, and brings the characters to life. The stories themselves are entertaining enough, although are probably best taken two or three at a time rather than all at once, as otherwise the consistent pattern of the stories could become annoying formulaic rather than pleasurable. I found that I usually worked out roughly what had happened and who had done it, but the exact details of how weren't that easy to spot -- although clear enough in hindsight...A marvellous way to spend a couple of hours, although I may go out and buy the set with the complete "Thirteen Problems" to replace this set and its companion set "The Blue Geranium and other problems", which don't quite cover the full 13 between them.