During the dog days of summer, or when you just need the real world to go away, there is no place like England and no one like Agatha Christie.

After a heavy dose of the scatological humor from David Sedaris, I took a break with Joan Hickson's delightful rendering of The Tuesday Club Murders. Hickson, who died in 1998, not only narrated a great many of Dame Christie's stories for the BBC, but played Miss Marple in a number of television films as well.

In this recording, first released in 2004, Miss Marple's regular group - an actress, a lawyer, a doctor, a retired director of Scotland Yard, a social couple and Miss Marple's nephew - decide to entertain each other with mysteries. No one gives Miss Marple much credit because she has never gone far from the village of St. Mary Mead. But she solves each of the 13 cases using the keen understanding of human nature she has developed from careful observations in her village.

Hickson's crisp English accent and Christie's archaic language and her humorous rendering of Miss Marple's cohorts is, well, transporting. You feel as if you are in the drawing rooms of the privileged in an England of 70 years ago.