YOU could peruse the classifieds in The Press just to be sure, but you are unlikely to spot: "A murder is announced and will take place on Friday, October the twenty ninth, at Little Paddocks – at six-thirty pm".

Such an advert, however, appears in the local Gazette at Chipping Cleghorn, stating the aforementioned pre-scripted death will occur at the home of Letitia Blacklock.

And so begins a Miss Marple Mystery that is drawing good houses to an old-fashioned night's theatre at York Theatre Royal in a week when Ruth Rendell's twisted Seventies' psychological thriller A Judgement In Stone is playing the Grand Opera House in a clash of murderous deeds.

Adapted for the stage with skill and relish by Leslie Darbon, A Murder Is Announced is an archetypal Christie drama from 1950 where we spend the night trying to eliminate names from the whodunit list after a group gathers at the allotted time and a gun is fired in the darkness. Once the lights are restored, a man's body is lying on the drawing floor of Letitia's Victorian house and Janet Dibley's Letitia has a bloodied ear.

Time for Tom Butcher's seen-it-all-before Inspector Craddock and Jog Maher's sidekick Sergeant Mellors to go about their detective work and for Louise Jameson's knitting enthusiast Miss Marple to do likewise, knitting all the clues together while defying the pain of her rheumatism.

Who's in the spotlight? Well, there's Dean Smith's impetuous Edmund Swettenham and his mother (Cara Chase); there's flighty Julia Simmons (Lucy Evans) and pucker Patrick Simmons (Will Huntington); there's Letitia's dear old companion Dora Bunner (Sarah Thomas), celebrating her birthday; and there's Phillipa Haymes (Alicia Ambrose-Bayly, a name for a John Betjeman poem, surely), tending to the flower arranging. Oh, and there's Mitzi, the blunt-speaking Eastern European cook that gives Lydia Piechowiak caustic comedy moments aplenty.

She is the one over-the-top role, but delightfully so, and elsewhere everything is played straight as Christie sets up her puzzle: a second door in the drawing room that has not been opened for years; assorted people turning out to be not who they first said they were (no clues, dear reader); a chocolate cake known as Delicious Death; and another sudden exit as the plot thickens as pleasingly as caramel in a pan.

Jameson's Miss Marple is suitably inquisitive, a little mischievous, complemented by Butcher's phlegmatic Craddock; Dibley has the period style off to a T, and all around them Michael Lunney's cast adds to the enjoyment and spirit of elegantly delivered whodunit fun.

Lunney's set is as old-fashioned as the drama but Christie does not need any modish tampering; play it respectfully, sincerely, with plenty of humour, a dash of darkness and atmospheric strings music (courtesy of Lynette Wenster), and that's why A Murder Is Announced is still such a joy in Middle Ground's third year of touring.

Agatha Christie's A Murder Is Announced, Middle Ground Theatre Company, York Theatre Royal, until Saturday. Box office: 01904 623568 or at yorktheatreroyal.co.uk