Hello! I am so profoundly grateful that you’ve come here. It’s a great favor you’re doing for me, and I appreciate it.
Currently conventional wisdom says I must make myself visible to the outside world. Discoverability, they call it. To that end I have started a Twitter account, @TheLarkinHunter. Someone else has the account @LarkinHunter. In fact, there are quite a few accounts with this name, but I don’t know any of them, and they’ve never tweeted. They’re just rudely squatting on the name. So, I’m stuck with TheLarkinHunter, which sounds a lot more pretentious than I’d like, but the nature of being stuck is that you’re…stuck. I’ve not set up a FaceBook “author page” yet (more exposure to pretense) but that’s on my to-do list, right behind “try to understand FaceBook.” And here’s my website. It’s fully operational, even if it is tiny and insignificant. Knowing me, the tweaking will never end.
The next challenge is to encourage the world to care that I’m here.
That’s a toughie, because everybody–and I mean everybody–in the world has a lot to think about and a lot to do. The planet is still relatively spherical and hasn’t drifted off its orbit around Old Sol. Humans are still constructed of some genetic material from a male and an equal amount from a female. Gravity still works.
Everything else is on a thrill ride. Governments get scarier by the day. Mobs get scarier by the day. Diseases get scarier by the day.
And then we’ve got to worry about transfats.
No wonder we like to curl up in a comfy chair and spend the afternoon in St. Mary Mead.
You know, I’d love to spend the summer re-reading all the Miss Marple stories, and so I shall. I shall also find the BBC television series and introduce my family to my favorite sleuth.
Agatha Christie’s book series for Miss Marple has been filmed several times. Margaret Rutherford, who looked much more like the Jetson’s robot housekeeper, Rosie, than she ever did Miss Marple, was, nevertheless, a fun ride in a number of movies made in the 1950s and 1960s. If the plots of the movies were no closer to Christie’s plots than the star was to Christie’s heroine, well, the flicks were still a bunch of fun.
Helen Hayes, always so pretty and so lovable, was a gentler, more English, Miss Marple in A Caribbean Mystery and They Do It With Mirrors on American television. I wish you could see photos of Miss Hayes as Miss Marple, but there are copyright laws to consider, so I can’t show those photos here. Feel free to use the links!
A few years ago, Granada Television got busy wrecking the franchise with yet another pretty and lovable actress, Geraldine McEwan. The wreckage is not the fault of Miss McEwan. No, no, no. The blame falls squarely upon the scriptwriters, who should have their computers confiscated, degaussed, and hidden in a library where the scriptors will never find them.
The definitive Miss Marple is, of course, Joan Hickson, the actress Agatha Christie had hoped would play the part. Coincident with the perfect actress were the best screenplays, supporting casts, and production values.
Now that I have reminded myself of how much I love Agatha Christie in general and Miss Marple in particular, I feel the need to get myself to the local bookshop to purchase several afternoons’ worth of genteel murder.
So there you have it: my first post. You don’t yet care about my writing, but at least I didn’t waste too much of your time. When you go to the bookshop today, what will you be hunting for?