Mr Marvell

In the Tommy and Tuppence short story The Man in the Mist, Mr Marvell is the solicitor representing James Reilly who was arrested halfway through the story for the murder of Gilda Glen.

Marvell told Tommy that he would never have believed that his client could be a killer. Reilly had always been a man of violent speech but that was all. It did not translate into action. Nonetheless, Marvell had to accept that the evidence against him was overwhelming, and that if he did not do it, then other, much more implausible people had to have done it.

Marvell does not appear in LWT's 1983 adaptation of the story (Episode 8 of Agatha Christie's Partners in Crime). There, Tommy's Father Brown type philosophical point that what we take for evidence is no more than impressions conveyed by the senses is made instead to Tuppence.