Guy Cuthbertson

He's bound to be loose because he's an artist.

An artist, Paris, models, the altogether.

There follows an exchange about him painting Griselda the vicar's wife, with a joke about whether she too could be in the altogether.

In Murder at the Vicarage, Miss Marple is nervous talking about sex and romance, pausing with an er before using the very word sex, the only appearance of the word in the novel.

There's money and the mutual attraction between people of an er opposite sex.

Conversations could be built entirely on suggestion and euphemism, even in the 1960s after the Chatterley trial, as in The Mirror Cracked where a discussion about the character Gladys' love life involves not getting any wrong ideas and our Gladys isn't that sort.

D.H.

Lawrence, on the other hand, is very specific and nothing is hidden.

Although he has a taste for poetic or erotic euphemisms too, usually involving the word secret, but these are not detective fiction secrets.

Secret sensitive thing, secret warm, secret entrances, secret openings, secret places.

You get the picture.

And nothing much is a secret in the unexplicated novel.

In Christie's The Moving Finger, the sexual content, the bad language, the filth is all there in the plot, in the poison pen letters that are at the heart of the story, but we don't get to read the letters.

The members of Limstock have received these anonymous letters that make scandalous accusations.

Words and letters have been cut out of a book and stuck onto paper in the classic way, spelling out things that are described as foul, disgusting, dirty, filled with vituperative and obscene abuse.

Recipients read them and they show them to other people, but we are left in the dark.

We get a few suggestions, but we don't get the abuse in any of the detail that could shock Christie's readers.

Mrs Dane Calthrop tells us about a letter making an accusation about Caleb and the schoolmistress, even though, we're told, Caleb had absolutely no taste for fornication.

He never has had.

Which is lucky, apparently, because he's a clergyman.