A Caribbean Mystery is a work of detective fiction by British writer Agatha Christie, first published in the UK by the Collins Crime Club on 16 November 1964[1] and in the United States by Dodd, Mead and Company the following year.

[4][5] A critic writing in 1990 judged this plot to be standard fare for any writer who travels to the Caribbean and needs double duty out of a vacation.

When Palgrave asks her if she wants to see a picture of a murderer, she listens intently – but after he finds the snapshot in his wallet, he suddenly changes the subject.

The next day, when the maid Victoria finds Major Palgrave dead in his room, Miss Marple is convinced he was murdered.

Meanwhile, she interviews the others: Tim and Molly Kendal, owners of the hotel; the Prescotts, a clergyman and his sister; Mr Jason Rafiel, a tycoon confined to a wheelchair; Jackson, his nurse/masseur/attendant/valet; Esther Walters, his secretary; the American Lucky Dyson and her husband, Greg; and Edward and Evelyn Hillingdon.

On the beach, Miss Marple sees Señora de Caspearo, a woman on holiday who says she remembers Major Palgrave because he had an 'evil eye'.

When police realize that the high blood pressure medicine did not belong to Major Palgrave, his body is exhumed and the autopsy reveals that he died by poison, as Miss Marple expected.

Miss Marple had thought Palgrave saw the Hillingdons and the Dysons over her right shoulder as they were coming up the beach, but had just realised that he had a glass eye on the left, so he could not have seen them.

He had been planning to marry Esther, after Molly's death, because he had heard that she was going to inherit a large sum of money from Jason Rafiel.

"[9][10] The millionaire Jason Rafiel appears again, posthumously, in the novel Nemesis where he sends Miss Marple on a case specifically because of her success in solving the events related in A Caribbean Mystery.

[citation needed] A 1983 US TV movie adaptation starred Helen Hayes as Miss Marple and Barnard Hughes as Mr Rafiel.

The New York Times says that Miss Marple has "a carload of suspects" to figure out why her friend was killed, in this film that first aired 22 October 1983.

][citation needed] A BBC TV adaptation starring Joan Hickson was shown in 1989 as part of the series Agatha Christie's Miss Marple, with Donald Pleasence co-starring as Mr Rafiel.

[citation needed] Changes were made from the novel: the Prescotts and Señora de Caspearo were omitted, Miss Marple holidayed on Barbados rather than the fictional island of "St Honoré",[12] and the blood pressure medication was renamed Tetrawolfide.

[citation needed] The order of their airing led to some viewer confusion, as Rafiel has died by the time the latter story commences.

][citation needed] In 2013, the book was adapted for the sixth series of ITV's Agatha Christie's Marple, starring Julia McKenzie as Miss Marple and co-starring Antony Sher as Jason Rafiel, Oliver Ford Davies as Major Palgrave, Hermione Norris as Evelyn Hillingdon and Robert Webb and Charity Wakefield as the Kendalls.

[citation needed] As with the Joan Hickson version, A Caribbean Mystery was adapted after Nemesis, despite the books' publication order.

[citation needed] This led to some continuity issues: in the 2009 version of Nemesis, Jason Rafiel is a German writer, but in A Caribbean Mystery (2013), he is an English chemical manufacturer.

][citation needed] The novel was adapted as a 2016 episode of the French television series Les Petits Meurtres d'Agatha Christie.

Michael Bakewell wrote a BBC Radio adaptation first broadcast in October 1997, with June Whitfield as Miss Marple, where the character of Señora de Caspearo is omitted but the plot of the novel is generally retained.