Happy Hallowe'en!

In honour of Hallowe'en, I will once again turn to my favourite mystery author - the Queen of Crime - Agatha Christie. Today's selection from the Christie canon is Miss Marple's last case: Sleeping Murder.

The novel begins with the arrival of lovely young Gwenda Reed to England. She has recently married a young man, Giles Reed. Giles has some sort of foreign service job that will necessitate a lot of moving around; occasionally accompanied by Gwenda, but sometimes not. The couple need a home base and have decided upon England. While Gwenda is from New Zealand, Giles is from England and it seems appropriate to establish themselves in that country. Both Giles and Gwenda are orphans but are fairly well off. Gwenda arrives in England to find a house and wait for Giles' arrival.

Gwenda leisurely tours the south coast of England, looking for the perfect house. She arrives at the seaside town of Dillmouth and immediately spots a house that is "her" house. After a brief tour in which Gwenda feels more and more at home, she impulsively buys the house and gets settled in. However, there are strange happenings in Gwenda's new house. A feeling, almost, like Gwenda has been there before. Gwenda hires are gardener to move the terrace steps over from the other side of the terrace to under the drawing room window. The gardener informs her that it will be an easy job, as someone has merely planted over the steps that were there before. Gwenda also has hired a contractor to make some renovations. However, Gwenda has another request for the contractors. She feels that there should be a door between the dining room and the drawing room, so that one does not have to go around by the hall. In fact, she is always trying to get into one room by going to a certain spot on the wall, as if there were a door there. She indicates to the contractors that they must make a door between the two rooms in that spot. The contractor agrees, and later confirms to Gwenda that the renovations will be really easy because there was already a door there that had been bricked up.

The last straw involves Gwenda's little bedroom. She is waiting for Giles to return before she moves into the master bedroom, so in the meantime she's staying in a comfortable little bedroom upstairs. The cook informs Gwenda that this room was probably a nursery at one point and Gwenda imagines what it might look like when she and Giles have children one day and picks out a lovely imaginary wallpaper: poppies alternating with cornflowers. One of the cupboards in the room has been painted over, and Gwenda must have the contractors pry open the doors. They do so, and Gwenda is shocked to find on the inside remnants of the original wallpaper on the walls: a pattern of poppies alternating with cornflowers.....How is Gwenda able to know so precisely about the previous state of the house? Gwenda is scared and accepts an offer to go stay with friends.

Gwenda travels to London to stay with friends: Raymond West and his wife Joan. Raymond is also entertaining his aunt, the sweet, elderly Miss Marple. West, Joan, Miss Marple and Gwenda go out to a play. Gwenda is enjoying herself until the last line of the play: "Cover her face; mine eyes dazzle: she died young." Gwenda screams and bolts from the theatre. Upon arrival back at the house, Miss Marple goes in to comfort Gwenda. Gwenda explains that upon hearing those words she had a flashback of a memory: a voice saying those words and, looking through the banisters, seeing a dead woman lying out on the floor with her gold hair spread all around. Who is the dead woman? "Helen" Gwenda answers. But Gwenda does not know any Helens. Who is the mysterious Helen? Who murdered her? Why? Why does Gwenda know so much about a house she just bought? Miss Marple helps the pair (Gwenda and Giles) solve all these mysteries about an unsolved crime stretching back over 20 years.

This is an excellent and suspenseful Miss Marple. Gwenda's feelings about the house drive the suspense in the opening chapters, and an atmosphere of faint malice settles over the book as a whole. It is an excellent Marple - and one I don't always remember because it isn't in my omnibus collection.

However, there is also a sort of disjointed, out of time feeling surrounding the book as well. When World War Two came to London, Agatha Christie wrote two mysteries: one with Hercule Poirot (Curtain) and one with Miss Marple (Sleeping Murder). In the event that she was killed in the Blitz, these novels could be published as conclusions to both series. Fortunately, Agatha Christie survived and went on to write many more lovely Poirot and Marple stories.

When she did reach the end of her life, in the 1970's, Christie authorized these older works for publication. Curtain was published before her death in 1975, whereas Sleeping Murder was published after, in 1976. Interestingly enough, while Curtain really does effectively end the Poirot series, Sleeping Murder is less cut and dried as the end of the Marple series and seems to be more of a stand-alone mystery in the Marple canon.

Anyway, the publication out of time leads to some interesting inaccuracies in the book because it doesn't take into account all of the changes that took place in Miss Marple's world after the war which Christie so eloquently addressed in her post-war Marples. As such, it is an interesting little anomaly and probably should be read when it was written - in the 1940's, as opposed to when it was published. Chronologically it fits in much better with the earlier Marples.

The true final Marple is Nemesis, which I also reread recently. It sort of draws from some of the characters that Marple met in A Caribbean Mystery, but spins off a new story. To solve that mystery, Miss Marple must also go back into the past. Miss Marple is more frail in Nemesis than she is depicted in Sleeping Murder, and I think that Nemesis makes a more fitting final Marple than does Sleeping Murder.