Agatha Christie: Sleeping Murder

This was a fascinating read for me, partly because it solved a story problem I've been having with a work in progress that's been stuck in draft form for ages. I don't even want to think about how long. A decade? Brrrr.

That novel is Summerlands, which anyone who reads anything I write will know keeps cropping up regularly as I get all excited to tackle it again, then get discouraged by the way it never quite works.

I wrote it when I didn't know how to write novels yet. It's strange how completely dysfunctional it is as a draft, while having two absolutely amazing characters. 

Sleeping Murder is about Gwen and Giles, two New Zealanders who are moving to England for no clear reason. (It doesn't matter.) Gwen picks a town and buys a house and then has repeated eerie experiences about the house, things she knows that she could not possibly know, including a sudden terrifying memory of seeing a murder. She thinks she's going insane until Miss Marple (yay!) talks her through it and Gwen finds out she actually did live in that house as a small child. 

The book was so spooky up to this point that I was afraid it would be supernatural in nature. That's not my cup of tea. But 70s Agatha Christie novels often incorporate this type of absolutely terrifying suspense (at least, to me) that seems like it includes supernatural elements. It's never supernatural! Spoiler alert! This happens in several novels of hers that I can think of and gets me every time. But I am a known chicken. 

Gwen and Miss Marple and then Giles embark on research to find out who Helen was--the murder victim, as Gwen remembers her name--and what actually happened to her. 

They follow all sorts of trails and track down her family and the sad end that came to Gwen's father, which she didn't even know about, as she was raised by family members back in New Zealand. They line up a crew of possible suspects, all of whom I suspected equally in turn, as I'm terrible at figuring out who committed the crime. This time I actually did figure it out before it was explained, purely because of one particular clue about the brandy.

The way Christie lays out clues and covers them up with confusion and misdirection is obviously brilliant. I'm easy to misdirect, it seems. The clues are all there and everything is watertight, thank goodness, unlike some recent things I've read and watched. It's an incredibly satisfying ending as it all comes clear at once. 

I realized I need to line up some suspects myself. Well, last year I realized the novel lacked a plot entirely. It was these two main characters coming to grips with their major damage and their ways of acting out that only hurt themselves. That's great and all, but it's not a plot. The mystery I added last year added a plot. But now, as I apparently need to get hit on the head with a coconut, two by four, or other large object, I need to line up suspects for the mystery.

That novel's mystery is: what happened to the two girls' mother? Again, I picked Sleeping Murder more or less at random in the library. I just thought it was one I hadn't read, which turned out to be true. But it's about Gwen's stepmother's murder and finding out what actually happened to her. And if she was actually murdered, who did it? 

My story should be equally mystifying about what happened to their mother. And if she was murdered, who did it? Their father is bizarrely cold and distant and alarming so it would be easy to think of him as a suspect, if they decide she was murdered. They've been raised far away by two different aunts, so they don't know him or each other or anything about their mother. In at least one draft, they thought those aunts were their mothers. Then only one sister did. I can't even remember where it stands now.

I need to rewrite that novel entirely. From scratch, from the ground up. I'm tempted to include all those fun things like letters and texts and email and historical documents like marriage licenses and whatnot. What does a coroner's report look like when someone disappears boating and is never found? I have no idea if you even need or get one in that case. Look at all the things I don't know. What happens in that case? Do I want to include that in the story as something someone says happened to her? Maybe. My search history is going to look pretty sketchy, but writing always causes that. 

I really like building up the character of a missing person who disappeared long ago through various records and artifacts and accounts from various people. Actually Maureen Johnson did this very well in The Box in the Woods. Even if that was outrageously convenient and deus ex machina in about seventeen different ways and I hated the long rambly assemble the audience and explain everything part. Okay, that book had serious problems I could explore at another time. But I liked how we learned about the one girl through all the materials from the past and what people said in the present.

Look, if people say all these different things, which is true? "She ran off and left you as babies." "She disappeared, all right. That's all I'm saying." "I heard she moved to Switzerland. Is that not true?" "Why don't you ask Artledge down at the bait shop. He rents boats. He always said there was something about their relationship that was, well, I don't want to say fishy, that's hack. Something off."

So give those girls this mystery to solve WHILE they're dealing with sixteen years of emotional damage from evil aunts (not enough evil aunts in fiction, seriously--why is it always uncles?--aunt power!) and coping with this weird icicle father they don't know and being in a strange place and getting talked about by everyone AND trying to figure out how they even begin to relate to each other.

It's fun, that's the main thing. And we are constantly asking questions as readers, going, "That guy is definitely lying," or "This person is holding back," or "My goodness, people will tell Miss Marple anything." 

One thing that gets a tiny bit tedious is how Miss Marple always knows the answer but won't tell anyone. She's always doing that thing where she looks from one to the other and says, "Oh, well, it seems perfectly clear to me," and they all get baffled and annoyed and blunder around nearly getting murdered because she wouldn't come out and say it. Stop it, Miss Marple!

Ooh, another thing that completely freaked me out in Sleeping Murder is that they went to the same nursing home that Tommy and Tuppence went to in the extremely creepy book where they're older and Tuppence researches a painting and gets into this bizarre divided house by a canal and on and on. That book is so upsetting. By the Pricking of my Thumbs is the name of it. The same truly weird old lady says the same thing to Gwen that she says in that book. How bizarre and fun! It's a cameo from another book entirely. 

I can just picture the author laughing to herself as she did that, knowing how people would react. 

There's a character in my novel The Last Word who's loosely based on Agatha Christie, or at least she's not in the book but it's all about her and her series of books. The main character, Ceci, is just arriving back in America after being abroad for two years, living on a shoestring, searching for evidence about the Agatha Christie character's mysterious life. I kind of love that book, even if it's not the best thing I ever wrote. Maybe I'll read it again and see if it's worth putting out on KDP. There's so much I adore about that character and that story. Gothic houses! An amazing great-aunt! A wonderful boy! A best friend who's an insecure but astonishing artist! And of course a massive mystery that unfolds throughout the book. 

That's the first novel that I ever bashed into shape as a completed piece. I seem to remember it has some issues, but generally I remember the negatives more than the positives, so maybe I fixed them or they're not as bad as I think. Who knows?

Agatha Christie! So good! So strangely formative for me, even though I didn't read most of her books until last year, or was it the year before? I spent one whole summer reading through almost all of them. What I ought to do is reread each one the minute I finish it, so I can really learn how she structures things, since I'm generally baffled the whole way through. The Agatha Christie Writing Program. Make it so.