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"No," said Miss Marple. "You believed him. It really is very dangerous to believe people. I never have for years." - Sleeping Murder
The Sum of It
Gwenda Reed, a young lady who grew up in New Zealand, has been sent to England by her new husband, Giles, to find them a house along the coast. She spies a white Victorian house from the road outside the town of Dillmouth, and gets a feeling that its the house for her. She goes about renovating the house based on her intuition, envisioning a new door connecting the dining room and drawing room, choosing a wallpaper of cornflowers and red poppies for a room that she feels used to be a nursery, asking the gardener to cut a new walkway in the garden. Only, it turns out there used to be a door where she asked for a new one to be cut, and a cupboard in the room that had been painted shut revealed old wallpaper exactly like what she had asked for, and when the gardeners went to cut the new path, evidence of an old path in the same spot was found.
Gwenda starts thinking she's psychic or something, which weirds her out, and so she decides to get away for a bit to visit her husband's friend #FamousNephew Raymond West, along with his wife and aunt, one Miss Jane Marple, in London. While they're watching the play The Duchess of Malfi, a character utters the line: "cover her face, mine eyes dazzle; she died young" and Gwenda shrieks, jumps out of her seat, runs out of the theater and takes a cab back to Raymond's house where she sits shivering in bed until Miss Marple comes in with a water bottle and a calm request that Gwenda tell her what exactly is going on. Gwenda finally tells her that when she heard the line, she immediately envisioned a man with "monkey's paws" strangling a beautiful blonde woman in the foyer of her house, then saying those exact words. Somehow, Gwenda is sure this woman's name was Helen. She tells Miss Marple about the other weird stuff going on related to her house, and that she's afraid she's going nuts.
Miss Marple explains that what makes more sense is that Gwenda has actually been in the house before, and maybe even witnessed a murder, even though Gwenda is sure she's never been to England. However, a bit of investigating reveals that her late father actually took her to England, to the very house, to live with her young stepmother, Helen, for a couple years when Gwenda was a baby. The stepmother eventually disappeared, and her father died soon after, having sent little Gwenda to live with relatives in New Zealand. Once she hears this, Gwenda is like oh crap was my stepmother #MURDERED in my house, and did I see it as a tiny child?! She and her husband Giles decide to start investigating, even though Miss Marple tells them they really ought to let "sleeping murder" lie, as getting mixed up in an old crime like this is #DANGEROUS. They're like yeah yeah this is our house, we have to protect it #HomeAlone and decide to embark on digging up old relatives, lovers, and employees of Helen's and trying to get to the bottom of why she really disappeared all those years ago. Out of concern (and probably curiosity, knowing her) Miss Marple arranges to visit some family friends in Dillmouth so she can keep an eye on things and help them out. Turns out in the end that it's a bloody good thing, too!
The YOA Treatment
As we were reading this one, we were both thinking "man, Agatha might have struggled a bit with Tommy and Tuppence in old age but she is still on FIRE with Miss Marple!" Then Audrey remembered that Sleeping Murder is actually one of two books, along with the last Poirot, Curtain, that Agatha always said she wrote during WWII and left in a safe in the names of her daughter and husband, for posterity's sake (and in the way of an inheritance, should the war prove fatal for Agatha, EEK thank goodness it didn't, not only because we would have missed out on so many great books!!) So, this final Miss Marple was actually written long before several others that were released before this one was published following Agatha's eventual death in the 1970s.
Regardless, this book is top form Agatha, a very creepy and mysterious mystery that absolutely keeps you guessing until the very end (as long as you haven't seen one of the two TV adaptations, or, if you've seen the ITV Marple version, you'll still be guessing as to when the troop of summer stock actors will turn up [spoiler: they are not in the book]). It really is a very clever concept with some truly deceptive red herrings, and the initial premise of a potentially haunted or sentient house reminded us of some other classics, like Henry James' The Turn of the Screw or one of our favorite recent novels, Rebecca Makkai's The Hundred-Year House.
While the real onus of the sleuthing is left to Gwenda and Giles, Miss Marple guides them along in their amateur detecting and steps in to help when she's needed. Since this book was technically written before Agatha let Miss Marple start getting really frail, in light of the last few Marples we've been reading, it was also nice to bid farewell to our favorite lady sleuth when she's still depicted in her prime, weeding in the garden, running up stairs, and garnering the respect of police inspectors all over England.
One of the most surprising things about The Year of Agatha for both of us has been that we truly enjoyed Miss Marple's mysteries even more than our beloved Poirot's! The joy and mischievous twinkle of Miss M's sleuthing style, the cozy nature of her environs and the clever, dark-horse nature of her character are a delight to read. While we've finished all the Marple books at this point, we feel confident that we'll be revisiting her stories many times over the years to come.
- E. & A.
P.s. We'll post about Curtain, and about our plans for 2017, after Audrey returns from her honeymoon later this week!
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