November 2012 Guest Editor Kate Mosse on Sleeping Murder...
No list would be complete without the Queen of Crime herself. I first stumbled upon Christie on a wet teenage family holiday. Her characterisation, her neat and slick plotting, the way she summons up a sense of place and period. This is one of my favourites, the last Miss Marple, a tale of old secrets and long shadows.
Young Gwenda Reed arrives in England from New Zealand, travelling ahead of her husband Giles and charged with the task of finding the perfect place to make their base. In the quiet village of Dilmouth, she finds a house with immediate appeal. A few renovations will convert it into her ideal home. Then things get very strange indeed. Wanting porch stairs, Gwenda hires a builder to put them in - only to find some old steps, covered up by bushes. She decides on a connecting doorway between the drawing-room and the dining-room, but discovers one already there, now plastered over. When she opens the painted-over doors of an old cupboard to find wallpaper exactly the same as she had imagined, she begins to wonder if she is going mad. Is her mind playing tricks on her, or does she unconsciously know how the house used to look? It takes Miss Marple to realise that an unsolved murder is behind Gwenda's apparent intuition - but even she does not suspect the murderer will strike again... Agatha Christie's final Marple mystery is dramatised with a full cast including Julian Glover and Carolyn Pickles.
