A key character from that novel makes a cameo here, thus placing “Sleeping Murder” before that book chronologically. The tie-in to “By the Pricking of My Thumbs” is even more overt. The phrase “murder in retrospect” is used a couple times in this novel, but that had become the alternate title of “Five Little Pigs.” “Sleeping murder” is another way of saying the same thing. Gwenda thinks the victim was her stepmother, who officially left town around that time but generally disappeared off the face of the earth – although letters to a relative suggest she was not murdered.Ĭhristie sometimes got titles in her head before attaching them to specific novels. What’s worse, they might awaken the murderer.Įighteen years before, Gwenda (then a baby) had seen a murder committed in the Dillmouth house she and her husband have now purchased – either by coincidence or by the universe’s sense of balance. That’s not to say there isn’t an intriguingly vague danger, as Marple warns Gwenda and Giles about digging up the past. Joining Poirot’s “Five Little Pigs” and Tommy and Tuppence’s “By the Pricking of My Thumbs,” this is Marple’s cold case novel. Cracking the cold caseĪt the same time as “Sleeping Murder” is a smart novel with a twisty plot and multiple well-developed suspects and witnesses, it’s also a rather relaxing story, as opposed to an intense and urgent one. Rather, it’s because I applied her lessons. As such, “Sleeping Murder” achieves the best of both worlds: I solved it, but not because I outsmarted Christie.
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