AR: 5.9

I have of course read this earlier, but have re-read it for discussion with my U3A Agatha Christie Reading group. I think they will enjoy the read. I think this is one of the best Marple stories.

Despite the advice not to investigate Gwenda and her husband decide try to work out what Gwenda's vague memories of the house she has recently bought actually mean.

I particularly liked the description of Miss Marple.
Miss Marple was an attractive old lady, tall and thin, with pink cheeks and blue eyes, and a gentle, rather fussy manner. Her blue eyes often had a little twinkle in them.

There are no signs that this was actually written during World War II and stored for later publication. Certainly no signs that it was meant to be Miss Marple's last case. ( )

Miss Marple's Last Case?
Review of the William Morrow Paperbacks edition (August 23, 2022) of the Collins Crime Club (UK) hardcover (October 1, 1976) & the Dodd, Mead & Company (US) hardcover (late 1976) originals.

"After eighteen years, you and Giles come along, asking questions, burrowing into the past, disturbing a murder that had seemed dead but was only sleeping … Murder in retrospect … A horribly dangerous thing to do, my dears. I have been sadly worried."

Sleeping Murder has Miss Marple helping Gwenda and Giles Reed, newlyweds who have moved into a new home in England after living abroad. Gwenda begins to have déjà vu feelings in the house as if she had witnessed a murder there. She also has memories of various doors and structures in the house. It gradually dawns on her that she had lived in the house in her childhood and that the murder recollection must be real. She and her husband set out on a dangerous course to uncover the murderer after many years.

See cover at https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/3/36/Sleeping_Murder_First_Edition_Cov...
The front cover of the original 1976 Collins Crime Club (UK) hardcover edition. Image sourced from Wikipedia.

On the Berengaria Ease of Solving Scale® I found Sleeping Murder to be on the high end i.e. an 8 or so. There were too many suspects and possible motives. You could perhaps make the leap to the solution by asking yourself "who is the unlikeliest of the characters to be the murderer?"

Confusion for Completists
Although it was the final published Miss Marple novel in 1976, Sleeping Murder is actually estimated to have been written between the years 1940-1944. You can read that background in the Wikipedia article linked above. It was followed in 1979 by a further posthumous collection in the UK Miss Marple's 6 Final Cases and 2 Other Stories, although those short stories had appeared earlier in the U.S.

Trivia and Links
Sleeping Murder was adapted twice for English language television series. The 1987 BBC version is faithful to the original. The 2006 ITV version adds new characters and subplots to the story. I did not find any free trailers or postings of either of them, but they are both available on the Britbox streaming service here in Canada.

The first TV adaptation was as part of the BBC's Miss Marple (1984-1992) series as Episode 6 in 2 parts in 1987, which starred Joan Hickson as Miss Marple.

The second TV adaptation was as part of ITV's Agatha Christie’s Marple (2004-2013) reboot series as Season 2 Episode 1 in 2006 which starred Geraldine McEwan as Miss Marple. ( )

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Interesting

First one I’ve ever properly guessed the killer early on. Normally she stumps me. But very clever and well done all the same. ( )

I've just come to expect so much from a Christie novel... so, what was a perfectly adequate mystery feels like a bit of a let-down. The pace was kind of plodding, and the solution doesn't come as much of a surprise by the time you're there. It seems like most people love it, though, so who knows! ( )

Newlywed Gwenda Reed has arrived in England with the goal of purchasing a house for herself and her husband, Giles, somewhere in the south of the country. As she tours the countryside she falls in love with Hillside near Dillsmouth. But as Gwenda lives in the house she is increasingly spooked by how familiar the house feels. While visiting distant relatives in London, with whom Miss Marple is also staying, a stray line in a play brings back horrific memories for Gwenda that seem to indicate a murder may have taken place in her home. While Miss Marple advises to leave everything be, Gwenda and Giles can't resist the mystery and so Miss Marple comes to town to keep the young couple from stumbling into too much trouble.

The final Miss Marple mystery is just as delightful as all that came before. While I did deduce the whodunnit just a page or two before the final reveal, the reading experience was in no way diminished. Christie's mysteries are always an excellent choice and I can't recommend them enough if British mysteries are at all your thing. ( )

Vintage Agatha Christie. I figured this one out well in advance of the ending, but I still enjoyed the read and remember why Christie was so popular in her time. At the time this was written, it probably wouldn't have been so easy to solve the who-done-it. Christie and others have honed my sense of possibilities. Miss Marple is a very subtle character in this novel, more a guide than a detective.

A nice break from some heavier reading...I'm in the process of reading Middlemarch and needed some air. ( )

Very enjoyable. AC wrote some real clunkers toward the end of her life, so I wasn’t sure what to expect in the last Miss Marple, but, altho a hair too convoluted, the plot was plausible and solvable, and even a little creepy. ( )

A young woman buys a strangely familiar house, discovers she lived there briefly as a young child. Delves into the disappearance of her stepmother, despite Miss Marple's caution to leave sleeping dogs.

The first couple of chapters are terrifying... especially if you read them home alone, in the dark. I must say, I enjoyed the thrill (as tame as my taste is). But after that it relaxed a bit and I finished the last couple of chapters happy in the knowledge that I had successfully pinpointed the murderer(but completely miffed the motive). ( )

And with that, I have finished the last of the Miss Marple novels.

Enjoyable! Spent a great morning just working on a puzzle and listening to this.

The beginning of the story is quite eerie, and the resulting mystery fun to try to puzzle out. A unique spin, as the murder happens twenty years before the events of the book begin. Gwenda and Giles are great main characters and try very hard as amateur sleuths, and Miss Marple is a delight as always.

Interesting to find out that Christie sat on this one for thirty-five years, and it was only published in the year after her death. Writing the last book of a longstanding series well in advance seems to me like a great idea, and has worked out great here -- ensuring Miss Marple finishes on a fresh, vigorous note, instead of petering out as Christie used up all her best ideas (though, did that ever really happen?). ( )

One of her best - newlyweds Giles and Gwenda move to Britain from NZ and coincidentally buy the house that Gwenda had lived in as a young child, the house from which her young stepmother had disappeared eighteen years earlier. Gwenda, alarmingly, begins to remember more about that time, and fortunately Miss Marple gets involved. The more they uncover, the more things begin to get dangerous. Re-read this not long after reading Professor Monckton-Smith's book "In Control" about coercive control and how it leads to murder and there are parallels in this much earlier fictional work.. ( )

In this short Miss Marple mystery, a young couple purchased a home. It invokes a memory in the young woman of a strangled woman named Helen. After meeting Miss Marple who encourages the woman to write to someone who may know if she'd ever lived in England, she finds the woman she saw was probably her stepmother. However, no one ever suspected the woman dead. The story told at the time was the woman ran off. Untangling eighteen years of lies, the couple, with the help of Miss Marple, find the truth. I knew from the moment we first met the guilty party who it was, but it was still a fun romp with Miss Marple via a Full Cast BBC production audiobook. ( )

Ok, I have Agatha Christie broken, after all her books, I know enough of how she makes her mysteries to pick out the murderer very early on, but also it is not a problem. You still have that self doubt, and even in books where I know for sure who the murderer is, the books are still readable. Agatha Christie really is a master of mystery.

So the book is about a young woman, coming to a house in the south of England and suddenly recalling of memories(?) of a strangled lady. Luckily she is a friend of a friend of Ms Marple (aren't everyone. :-) ) so she is not on her own.


( )

Almost at the end of my journey with Miss Marple and this one was really great. Miss Marple helps the wife of her young nephew deal with a recently revived memory of her having witnessed a murder as a child. The thing about this one is what is left unsaid, in this case, the unusual relation between the victim and her brother. Today we would just flat out say he molested her, but Christie has to talk around it and not state the obvious. ( )

Well I found this one very interesting. I have had this book on my shelf for a while, just didn't get around to reading it. This is the last of the Miss Marple standalone novels. She doesn't quite go out with a bang, but seems content with helping a newly married couple.

"Sleeping Murder" follows a newly married young woman named Gwenda. Her husband Giles is still abroad and she has been told to find a home for the two of them to settle into. When Gwenda finally finds what she considers "their" house, she is astonished that she knows what the wallpapers in certain rooms should be, thinks about putting in a door (and finds one has been plastered in) and feels she is losing her mind. She eventually goes away to visit family of her husband. While there she meets Miss Jane Marple and after a night out where the script in a play scares her, tells Miss Marple everything. From there the book follows Gwenda, her husband Giles, and Miss Marple trying to get to the truth of an old memory of Gwenda's.

I liked Gwenda, she is reminiscent of some of Christie's other female characters. Not quite a Lucy Eyelesbarrow, but no slouch. When Gwenda realizes she may have witnessed a murder when she was a child, she decides to go ahead to find out who could have done it. She is very fast on her feet and has a way of making people talk to her too.

I found Giles to be a pain though. He constantly talked over both Gwenda and Miss Marple. I was happy when the one inspector sent him away, even he knew things would go easier if he wasn't in the room.

Miss Marple though I was slightly puzzled by, she knew pretty early on who was the one behind everything, why she didn't feel the need to tell Gwenda and Giles made no sense. One of the reasons why I gave this four stars.

There are also so many plot points that are never tied up to my satisfaction. For example, we hear about the one character Jackie, and Gwenda makes a comment that his wife is afraid of him, and then nothing. Same issue with the character of Walter Fane. There are just too many strange men moving about in this story.

Also I think I found an error in this book. Miss Marple talks to Colonel Bantry's wife and he is mentioned too. I could have sworn in "The Mirror Crack'd" he was dead. There is mention of Miss Marple solving "The Murder at the Vicarage" and "The Moving Finger."

The writing was typical Chrisite. I have to say though it was fairly easy to see who had done this murder if you took your time with if. Probably because nothing else made sense.

The flow started off pretty slow. Things really don't get moving until Gwenda goes off to London to visit Raymond West and his wife and meets Miss Marple. ( )

Once it seems likely there has been a murder the really interesting portion of the book is over, since the murderer should be obvious. ( )

Sleeping Murder by Agatha Christie, the final Miss Marple mystery, was published posthumously in 1976, although she had written it years earlier during the Second World War. As a new bride comes to England ahead of her husband and purchases a house in which to start their life together, she starts having flashbacks about a murder. It turns out that she had lived in that very house as a very young child and may have been an eyewitness to the murder of her step-mother. Miss Marple, a family friend, although fearful of stirring up the past, does help the young couple as they investigate and, just as Miss Marple thought, the murderer is still very much in the picture and has no intention of allowing his crimes to be exposed.

I thoroughly enjoyed Sleeping Murder. Miss Marple was shrewd yet compassionate and the newly weds were very likeable and sympathetic characters. Agatha Christie certainly knew how to put masterful puzzles together and then slowly allow the pieces to fall into place. With a few red herrings scattered about the sharp instincts of Miss Marple are called into play and she doesn’t disappoint.

I was a little concerned about this being touted as Miss Marple’s “last case”, but Sleeping Murder was a clever, well-written story with no hint of finality aimed at Jane Marple. Once again I was both charmed and satisfied by an Agatha Christie mystery. ( )

Ceritanya bagus mengungkap pembunuhan dimasa lalu, tetapi sayangnya pembunuhnya bisa ditebak sejak pertengahan cerita :( ( )

An interesting and easy read. I'd missed the mark when I guessed who did it, but that just made the explanation of why and how more interesting. ( )

"Is that you, Gwennie? I can't see your face...My eyes are dazzled. And then Gwenda screamed. Looking at those smooth monkey's paws and hearing that voice in the hall, "It was you..." she gasped. "You killed her...killed Helen...I know now. It was you...all along"
This was Ms Marple's last case. Agatha Christie wrote two manuscripts and locked them away until after she died - a last adventure for both Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot.

Picked this up for $1.00 at the Agoura library book sale (every Saturday, downstairs).

5/7 Predictable and not one of her best, but still a pleasant read. ( )

I love Miss Marple; she is wise and knows human nature and knows that people can not be taken at face value, they lie. This is her last murder mystery in the series, which don't have to be read in order to enjoy them, but I prefer to see her more in the picture than in this story. She hovers in the background, helping the nice young couple afflicted by a ghostly vision from the past, but she's not really present in the story literally and figuratively. ( )

When I picked this up to read, I noticed it was billed as Miss Marple's "last case." However, it was not due to Marple's death, but rather the author's. It doesnt read as a finale, but being one of her last novels it does showcase how accomplished she had become at her craft.

Recently married Gwenda is searching for a new home when she falls in love with Hillside. Once she's moved in, she begins to worry when she finds herself knowing things she shouldn't - such as the design of a wallpaper hidden behind a shelf. It's Miss Marple who zeroes in on the likeliest answer. Gwenda had lived in the house as a child! But her memory of a strangled women at the base of the stairs leaves her and her husband determined to learn the truth. Miss Marple advises them to let "sleeping murder" lie, but they are compelled to unravel the mystery. Yet, someone doesn't want them to learn what really happened to Helen. Since the murder happened 18+ years prior, this was technically a cold case, which is unusual among Miss Marple's book. Evidence is scant, so the protagonists are forced to focus on people and motives.

This was an excellent mystery with multiple viable suspects, and an exciting ending. Highly recommended. ( )