Remembrance of Things Past

 

I first read this sometime in the 1980s, after reading The Mirror Cracked From Side to Side, both my first Jane Marple books (I had only known Hercule Poirot before) which I bought from the St John's secondhand bookshop at Bukit Timah Plaza.

I liked Sleeping Murder a whole lot better, and never until now, analysed that. It just seemed better, set in a world that hadn't started to fray at the edges. 

I looked for the book the year before last as a present for my sister-in-law, Nikki, because my brother told me she had started reading this at my sister, Jackie's house in England and hadn't quite finished it.

So I went looking for it in December of 2019 before Covid had unleashed its deadly tentacles on all of us. And I couldn't find it. Not anywhere. 

Then last year I stumbled upon it while looking for something else also at Christmas-time. I bought two copies, one for Nikki and one for me.

Re-reading it, I was wrapped in its warmth, and I wondered many things. If this was the real last Jane Marple book, why did it seem set an an earlier time than The Mirror Cracked? Why was that book more like a world disintegrating while this, more like the world when things still made sense and there were some certainties?

For the first time I decided to look up the history of the book, and discovered that Agatha Christie had written it during The Second World War, and had planned on publishing it posthumously. She willed it to her husband Sir Max Mallowan, just like she had willed Curtain: Poirot's Last Case to her daughter. She thought she was going to die in the war and was just tying up loose ends.

As I said, the book is warm and the threads of the world still hang together. Early on in the book Miss Marple visits her friends Arthur and Dolly Bantry. Dolly is in her garden talking about her plants. There is such a sense of reassurance in that scene. In The Mirror Cracked, which is not the last Jane Marple book but sure feels like it, Arthur is dead and Dolly has sold the house to an American actress. Miss Marple is so frail that when she goes visiting a new development that has sprung up near the village, she takes a fall and is helped by a kind, bossy, interfering woman who turns out to be the first murder victim. In that book there is a lot of remembrance of things past and a sense of the post-war world which has unraveled beyond description. 

I think people don't give Agatha Christie enough credit. The world she created for her characters was the contemporary world. But I think she liked the contemporary world less and less (her complaints can be heard through her characters, usually fussy old ladies mourning what once was). There is a cheapness, a lack of quality in the world emerging where things are not quite quite, that she seems to handle well.

I was hooked on Agatha Christie, ever since at 13, while waiting for my mother and father to come back from hospital (my grandfather had taken a fall and it was to be his last) I read Sad Cypress. And oh, how I loved it. And oh, how I loved the characters, especially Elinor, the one accused of murder. I loved everything from her name, to how elegant and "finished" she was. I started to read other Agatha Christies voraciously to find another Elinor. But I never did.

However, I did love her novels set before the war and the rations, when children had a nursery, a good breakfast of bacon and eggs rather than the cardboardy corn flakes so beloved of Kelloggs and its ilk.

Anyway, this story (despite being touted as 'Jane Marple's last case') is set in the 1930s. Gwenda Reed (newly married 21-year-old from New Zealand) is in England presumably for the first time charged to find a house for her and her new husband to settle down in. Her husband Giles' only instruction is that she find something in the south.

She goes from house to house until she stumbles on one in Dillmouth, a seaside town, that feels like home. After a series of increasingly scary (to her) coincidences, she discovers (or rather Miss Marple, whom she meets) leads her discover that she has lived in the house before. That is why it feels like home. But she has remembered something shocking from her past, a woman strangled in the hall, a man standing over her with monkey's paws reciting a few lines from the play, The Duchess of Malfi:

Cover her face,

Mine eyes dazzle,

She died young.

Gwenda, who is being treated to a play by Giles' cousins in London, Raymond West (who happens to be Miss Marple's nephew) and his wife Joan, hears these lines, screams and rushes out of the theatre. Miss Marple comes up to talk to her when they get home, bringing a glass of something strong and two hot water bottles (how comforting this scene is), and she helps Gwenda figure out that the house seems familiar because it is; namely because she lived in it before. Also, that she actually witnessed a murder.

And so the story takes its course, with Miss Marple in the background, helping them make sense of information, pointing out what to her is obvious (but not to anyone else), tackling the bindweed growing the garden (the bindweed which has an underground root system turns out to be a metaphor for the murder) and finally, apprehending the murderer in the act.

"Wicked," she says. In fact 'wicked' seems to be her favourite adjective when describing the evil that men do, that lives after them.

The plot is interesting, the book keeps you hooked (in a way the later, more modern ones didn't) and it is a very satisfactory whodunnit.

As I said, I love Christie's older books set in the 1920s, 30s, maybe 40s. I didn't like her newer ones because I didn't like the world they described, although this is my world. I wonder how she would have written a novel set in the 2010s or the 2020s. How would she have brought in the internet and digital technology and all those things that split us and our attention into a million pieces, never to be joined, never to be whole again.

I would highly recommend this book, if you don't like your meat too raw.