by John Curran
Sleeping Murder 11 October 1976
Gwenda Reed’s new house evokes disturbing memories and her attendance at a performance of The Duchess of Malfi confirms her suspicions that, as a child, she witnessed a murder there. Miss Marple’s advice to let sleeping murder lie is ignored and a murderer prepares to kill again.
Although published ten months after Christie’s death, Sleeping Murder was written during the Second World War and, like Curtain, placed in safekeeping to appear only after its author’s death. Or so, until the discovery of the Notebooks, we thought…
Notes relating to the development of Sleeping Murder appear in Notebooks 17, 19, 33, 44, 63 and 66, an indication of its convoluted genesis: it underwent two changes (at least) of title and its history is linked with Taken at the Flood (see Chapter 12), which in turn is linked with They Do It with Mirrors. The Notebooks also show that at various times it was to involve the motif from the Mr Quin story ‘The Dead Harlequin’ of a person looking down at a dead body on the floor; it could have been a Poirot title and, even more amazingly, a Tommy and Tuppence novel. And despite the assertion that it was written during the Blitz, the Notebooks reveal a very different timescale for its creation.
The first page of Notebook 19 is headed:
Cover Her Face
The Late Mrs. Dane
They Do It with Mirrors
The promising title ‘The Late Mrs. Dane’ was not pursued although the name appears in the early sketches for Sad Cypress and The A.B.C. Murders. Cover Her Face, meanwhile, was the one-time title for Sleeping Murder. It was originally called Murder in Retrospect, as it appears on one of the surviving typescripts; and as Chapter 5 of the novel asserts. Then the American publishers of Five Little Pigs appropriated this title in 1942, so the stored manuscript was renamed Cover Her Face. All was well until P.D. James used the latter title in 1964 for her first detective novel. Agatha Christie herself, in a 1972 letter to her agent, suggested She Died Young. Eventually the final Miss Marple novel to appear in print was published in 1976 as Sleeping Murder. But, as can be recognised from the details in the following extract—the familiar house, the wallpaper, the door—the title Cover Her Face appears frequently in the Notebooks in connection with Sleeping Murder.
Cover her Face
The House—recognition—door—Staircase etc. Poirot and girl at Duchess of M—her story
Cover her Face
…in the train—then the house—feeling of knowing it—the wall paper in this room—(inside closet)—the door but it was the door that really shook her
The complex history of this novel is best exemplified by a brief quotation from Notebook 63:
Helen—Start with the house and the girl and Tuppence (?) or friend—Raymond West and wife—the things happening one by one—then the theatre—Malfi—a T and T story? A Miss M story? An HP story?
Helen Rendall—suicide—hanged herself—her husband sold the house and went abroad.
Now who killed her?—Her brother—eminent surgeon—Doctor?—Husband? shell-shocked—girl’s husband? H is P’s second wife—young, flighty—a lover—Fergus—chauffeur or lover
The only real certainty in all of this plotting is a girl buying a house that contains memories from her earlier life, and we can see from the above extract that Christie was undecided as to whose case this was to be—Miss Marple, Poirot, even Tommy and Tuppence! Apart from that, there was no clear idea of how to proceed; and, presumably, depending on the detective she chose, a different book and possibly a different plot would have followed. This vacillation about the detective also raises questions about the book being written specifically as Miss Marple’s last case; if it was created as her final investigation Miss Marple would have been a given from the start.
Notebook 17 has a clear outline of the plot as far as the first four chapters. The heroine’s name, later to change to Gwenda, is here Gilda, although her husband’s remains the same:
Gilda—young married woman arriving Plymouth or Southampton—feels ill—stays night then hires car—drives slowly through Southern England. Feeling of coming home—evening—down into the valley—board up—visit to house agent—(former owners?). She buys it—writes letter to husband (or takes it furnished? unfurnished?) Incidents—the path—the door—the wallpaper—sends telegram to London—to Giles aunt Miss M?—or to Giles cousin Miss M is her aunt—or to the Crests—theatre—some young people—etc.—Cover her face—she rushes out and home. Joan asks her—Miss M. comes up with hot water bottles and hot coffee and sugar. The next morning…Gilda tells her all about it—Helen etc.
Notebook 66 begins as Notebook 17 but then diverges briefly to a different idea before returning to the Duchess of Malfi theme. Also included in this jotting is the notion of a father in a mental hospital for a murder he may or may not have committed, an idea which appears in Sleeping Murder.
Cover her Face
Start with girl and friend (f[emale]) find house [in] Sidmouth—queer things etc.
Husband comes (or is coming)—A’s fear—consults local doctor—really crook? He advises her to leave neighbourhood—later window box falls on her—‘the house hates me’)—play—Duchess of Malfi etc.—etc.—Helen. Is her father in loony bin because he thinks he killed his young wife
Notebook 44 confuses the issue further with mention of a soldier and Poirot:
Theatre party
Duchess of Malfi—Cover her Face—girl screams—taken out—won’t go home with fiancé—young soldier—goes with Poirot. A man looking down at someone dead—the man with the hand—not only that—familiar house—seen it all before
And Notebook 33 shows the potential Harlequin connection:
Continuation of Harlequin and Helen?
Girl (Anne) comes down stairs and sees girl dead and man/woman bending over her—(grey hands) Helen
Eventually, with the plot well in hand and Miss Marple firmly installed as the detective, Christie is able to follow her alphabetical plan:
A. Love letter in bureau to Musgrave? [mentioned in Chapter 17 iii by Erskine]
B. Newspaper adv. seen by the ex-servant [Chapter 12]
C. Servant 1? 2? heard that H. afraid of someone [Chapter 14]
D. 3 servants—1. Nurse flighty—out that night…(She is C [above])
2. Cook—Mrs. F’s servant—very young at time
3. Lily—very young at time—say housemaid—clothes wrong—saw something out of window? [Chapter 14]
E. Fane in office—gentle, repressed—never married—possessive mother [Chapter 13]
F. Miss M and mother—learns about Jackson’s boy—also about man on way out—Major M [Chapter 16]
G. Jackson [Affleck]—left under a cloud—(in Fane’s office?) made good—member of an accounting firm—2nd murder—Lily? Nurse? [Chapter 21 and 22]
H. Major and Mrs. Musgrave [Erskine]—Gwenda talks to him—lovely girl—yes, I fell in love with her—my wife—young children—suppose I did the right thing—came down to Dilmouth because I wanted to see where she lived once [Chapter 17]
I. Miss M says—body can always be put where you want it—in garden—following on J. [Chapter 23]
J. Dr. Kennedy with G. Gil and Miss M—the 3 men—which? Then subsequent lives—Miss M. asks how a man would feel—lonely—want to talk [Chapter 23 is the nearest match]
In a somewhat lacklustre book the alibi for the Lily Kimble murder shines out as a prime example of Christie ingenuity. And it appears in the book much as outlined in Notebook 17. As usual with the best Christie ploys it is simplicity itself:
Circumstances of Lily’s killing
Writes (against husband’s advice) to Dr. K—He when he comes to see G[iles] and G[wenda] finds Marple—brings her letter—says he has asked her to come on Tuesday by 4.30 train changing at Dillmouth Junction. G and G get there at 4.30. Actually he tells her to come by 2.30 train—two letters—just the same—except for time
Overall, however, Sleeping Murder is not in the same class as other titles wr
itten in the early 1940s—One, Two, Buckle my Shoe, Evil under the Sun or The Body in the Library. And, thanks to the Notebooks, we now have a possible reason why.
Notebook 14 contains the first reference to a date in conjunction with this book, September 1947:
Plans Sept. 1947
Dying Harlequin
Cover her face (Helen)
Crooked House (The Alt[eration]s) Done
And it is this date that completely contradicts all the theories we have received about the date of the book’s creation. There is no other novel that could possibly fit the description of ‘Cover her face (Helen)’ so it is definitely a reference to the book that we know as Sleeping Murder. But if it was only in the planning stages (and a very early stage to judge by the brevity of the note) in September 1947 the writing of it is placed much later than heretofore presumed.
This complication is underlined on the following page when we find a date more than a year later again, with still only the barest outline of the plot:
Plans Nov. 1948
Cover her Face
The girl (or young wife) has memories—come back—point it—‘Helen’ is dead at foot of stairs—‘Grey fingers’. Advertisement for Helen Gilliat (name found in a book)—answered by Dr. Gilliat—a plastic surgeon—it was his sister?
And some of the plot outlined here (‘name found in a book—answered by Dr. Gilliat—a plastic surgeon’) bears no relation to the plot of Sleeping Murder, although the reference to ‘Grey fingers’ here and ‘the man with the hand’ above, is reflected in the final confrontation in the book, when their disturbing significance becomes clear. Clearly there was still a lot of planning to complete. So we can move the writing of it nearer to 1950, i.e. almost ten years later than the supposed 1940 date.
There are yet further indications that this book was written several years after the war. In the following extract from Notebook 19 (‘girl at theatre—stumbles out’ clearly identifies Sleeping Murder) we find a reference to ‘in the war years’, a phrase which would surely be written only long after the war had ended:
Jimmy Peterson comes from U.S.A. to look up Val (who was over there in the war years). Girl at theatre—stumbles out—young man follows her
Two final points support the theory that Sleeping Murder was not written during the war. First, why write, in the early 1940s, a ‘final’ case for Miss Marple when at that point her only fulllength case had been The Murder at the Vicarage, published in 1930, and The Body in the Library was not to appear until 1942? And second, in Chapter 24 i of Sleeping Murder Inspector Primer mentions the ‘poison pen trouble down near Lymstock’, a direct reference to The Moving Finger, published in 1943.
Overall, Sleeping Murder is a disappointing climax to Miss Marple’s career. While a perfectly adequate detective story it is not in the same class as the previous year’s technical tour de force, Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case; or, indeed, A Murder is Announced, the real apex of Miss Marple’s career. The possibility that it was written much later than previously suspected would go a long way towards explaining why.
Exhibit E: N or M?—A Titles Quiz
The two essentials for a story were a title and a plot—the rest was mere spadework, sometimes the title led to a plot, all by itself as it were, and then all was plain sailing—but in this case the title continued to adorn the top of the page and not the vestige of a plot was forthcoming.
‘Mr Eastwood’s Adventure’
All of the following were considered, but ultimately discarded, as titles for Christie works. They are drawn from the notebooks, the typescripts or manuscripts, readers’ reports and correspondence. Some are more obvious than others and the list includes novels, short stories, plays and a Mary Westmacott.
1. Tragic Weekend
2. Post Mortem Justice
3. Retrospective Death
4. In Memoriam
5. Death of a Games Mistress
6. The Innocent
7. Aftermath
8. Blood Feast
9. The Hand
10. A Death has been Arranged
11. Operation Deadline
12. Return Journey
13. Death is Folly
14. Easeful Death
15. Viper’s Point
16. 2nd Innings
17. The Tangled Web
18. Laura Finds a Body
19. The Flowing/Incoming Tide
20. A Serpent’s Tooth
21. Cat among the Pigeons
22. The Soul in the Window Seat
23. The Spider’s Web
24. The World’s Forgetting
25. The Manor House Mystery
26. Shadow in Sunlight
Answers on the following page.
Answers[1]
8
Destination Unknown: Murder Abroad
Everything the same every day—nothing ever happening. Not like St. Mary Mead where something was always happening.
A Caribbean Mystery, Chapter 1
SOLUTIONS REVEALED
Appointment with Death (play) • ‘The House at Shiraz’ • The Man in the Brown Suit • Murder in Mesopotamia • Triangle at Rhodes’
More than any of her contemporaries Agatha Christie used ‘abroad’ as a background throughout her career. As early as her third title, The Murder on the Links, she despatched Poirot to France. In her first decade of writing three further titles—The Man in the Brown Suit, The Big Four and The Mystery of the Blue Train—feature predominantly foreign settings. And as late as 1964 Miss Marple brought her knitting to the Caribbean. Many of Christie’s thrillers have similar backgrounds—They Came to Baghdad, Destination Unknown, Passenger to Frankfurt. And Poirot solves some of his most famous cases far away from Whitehaven Mansions—Death on the Nile, Murder on the Orient Express, Murder in Mesopotamia and Appointment with Death. All of this reflected Christie’s own lifelong love of travel.
The Man in the Brown Suit 22 August 1924
When she is suddenly orphaned, Anne Beddingfeld comes to London where she witnesses a suspicious death in a Tube station. A further death in the deserted Mill House convinces Anne to investigate and she boards a ship bound for South Africa, where she becomes involved in a breathless adventure.
Christie’s fourth novel drew extensively on her experiences with her first husband Archie when they both travelled the world in 1922. Although it starts in England, much of the novel is set on a ship travelling to South Africa and the climax of the novel takes place in Johannesburg. It is not, strictly speaking, a detective story but it does have a whodunit element. An exciting story featuring murder, stolen jewels, a master criminal, mysterious messages and a shoot-out, it is an apprentice work before Christie found her true profession as a detective novelist. Nevertheless it is a hugely enjoyable read with a surprise solution. And this is why it is an important entry in the Christie canon—it presages her most stunning conjuring trick by two years and does it in a most subtle and ingenious way. And it also adopts the technique of using more than one narrator, a scheme that appears, in various guises, throughout her career in novels as diverse as The A.B. C. Murders, Five Little Pigs and The Pale Horse.
This unpublished photograph, from her 1922 world tour with Archie, shows Agatha Christie buying a wooden giraffe beside a train, exactly as her heroine, Anne, does in Chapter 23 of The Man in the Brown Suit.
The real-life Major Belcher, who employed Archie as a business manager for the round-the-world trip, convinced Christie to include him as a character in her next novel. And he was not satisfied to be just any character; he wanted to be the murderer, whom he considered the most interesting character in a crime novel. He even suggested a title, Mystery at Mill House, the name of his own house. In her Autobiography she says that although she did create a Sir Eustace Pedler, using some of Belcher’s characteristics, he was not actually Belcher.
She also relates in her Autobiography that when the serial rights of The Man in the Brown Suit were sold to the Evening News they changed
the title to Anne the Adventuress. She thought this ‘as silly a title as I had ever heard’—and yet the first page of Notebook 34 is headed ‘Adventurous Anne’.
The surviving dozen pages of notes in Notebook 34 reflect the course of the story and represent all that remain of the plotting. Their accuracy suggests that they represent a synopsis of earlier, rougher notes, but as Christie began the notes for this book in South Africa it is understandable that they no longer exist.
Chapter I—Anne—her life with Papa—his friends…his death—A left penniless…interview with lawyer left with £95.
Chapter II—Accident in Tube—The Man in the Tube—Anne comes home.
Announcement in paper ‘Information Wanted’ solicitor from Scotland Yard—Inspector coming to interview Anne—her calmness—Brachycephalic—not a doctor. Suggest about being a detective—takes out piece of paper—smells mothballs—realises paper was taken from dead man 17 1 22
III—Visit to Editor (Lord Northcliffe)—takes influential card from hall—her reception—if she makes good. The order to view—Does she find something? Perhaps a roll of films?
V—Walkendale Castle—her researches—The Arundel Castle—Anne makes her passage
VI—Major Sir Eustace Puffin [Pedler]—changing cabins—13—to—17—general fuss—Eustace, Anne and Dr Phillips and Pratt all laying claim to it
Or man rushes in to ask for aid—after stewardess has come she finds he is stabbed in the shoulder—Doctor enters ‘Allow me’—She is suspicious of him—he smiles—in the end man is taken into doctor’s cabin and Ship’s doctor attends him