Guy Cuthbertson

In A Caribbean Mystery two years later, we learn that sex as a word had not been mentioned in Miss Marple's young days, but there had been plenty of it, not talked about so much, but enjoyed far more than nowadays, or so it seemed to her.

Marple recalls that sex was called sin once upon a time, but now it was a kind of duty.

This was after the famous Chatterley trial of 1960, which has often been associated with the arrival of the 1960s permissive society.

So we can take her thoughts as a criticism of Lady Chatterley and her influence.

In Nemesis, in 1971, we are told that too much attention is paid to sex, which cannot replace love.

The words love and romance are more likely in Marple's stories than sin and sex are, but also Christie has an ear for euphemistic British language.

This is chaste language in a way, but we know what it is referring to.

Christie loves the way British people gossip about these things and try to speak in an everyday code.

It's Christie's love of language that comes out in these instances.

Women in the village gossiping about, shall we say, a young woman seen sunbathing or going into a bachelor's home one evening or an elderly bachelor buying flowers for a handsome widow.

They use language that wouldn't even make a choir boy blush, but which contains all manner of sins.

Looseness, a loosening of moral fibre.

Someone naughty, a nasty old man perhaps.

A gent with a roving eye or an old fool.

You know, one of that kind, or the sort of person.

That kind of thing, getting ideas, a bit of dirt, having the cum hither in your eye.

Is there something between them?

Was she in the altogether?

The altogether, that term for nudity, is memorably used in Murder at the Vicarage during a discussion about the painter Lawrence Redding.

Lawrence Redding is a man with the name and characteristics of the writer Lawrence.