Celebrating Miss Marple and Sleeping Murder Transcript

Music

Welcome to Shedunnit. I'm Caroline Crampton.

2026 marks fifty years since the final Miss Marple novel, Sleeping Murder, was published. But as Shedunnit listeners well know, the conversation about Agatha Christie's most unassuming yet deadly sleuth is very far from over. At this year's International Agatha Christie Festival, held in Agatha's birthplace of Torquay, Devon, I got to take part in an event that dissected the reputation and background of Miss Marple as both a woman and a detective, and I'm delighted to be able to share the recording with you now. Joining me on the panel was Professor Michelle Kazmer from Florida State University and the historian Rachel Trethewey, with the journalist Sarah Ransome acting as chair — the first voice you'll hear is her. You'll also get to hear the full audience Q&A at the end — listen out to see if you spot a well known voice from the world of Christie podcasting!

Music

Sarah: Michelle, I'd like to start with you, and I'd like to start with Miss Marple and ask you really, why does Miss Marple work so brilliantly as a detective, and she's got no official position, has she? No police powers and often appears to be underestimated.

Michelle: Well, I think like many of us, she thrives on being underestimated, right? And her superpowers are she can gain access to a wide variety of social settings in order to get the information that she needs, make the change. She wants to be in the world. She is a lot more physically vigorous than people ever manage somehow to give her credit for. Of course, we even see that at the end of Sleeping Murder, where she runs up the stairs with a syringe of soapy water to get at the perpetrator.

And sometimes people say, how's Miss Marple out there running up a flight of stairs? Well, I would say look at A Caribbean Mystery where she's army crawling around on the ground, in order to spy in a window. Look at The Mirror Crack'd, and she's taken off on a walk to the development regardless of how far it's going to be because she wants to go and find out. And I think her physicality, her access, and also her ability to use logic. She's not nearly as twittery as people might imagine.

Sarah: Underestimate her actual peril. Then obviously Caroline, if you had to explain Miss Marple's appeal to someone who'd never read a Christie novel, what would you say? How would you describe it?

Caroline: I think we are quite used to, in detective novels, thinking about the least likely suspect. Miss Marple is the least likely detective when she wants to blends into the background, and so she can move through different social settings, different spaces, be different things to different people, and I think that's incredibly appealing.

I'm imagining this person I'm talking to has maybe watched some crime, like contemporary procedurals on TV, Law & Order, something like that. So this is not like that. This is not people busting in through the front door to ask questions. This is a little old lady sitting in the corner knitting with her ears wide open

Sarah: And she doesn't do a lot of knitting, a lot of currently, doesn't she? Yeah. She's always out the back. And I've been thinking about this a lot and I wonder, it does seem to me that in some ways she's a bit of stealth feminist, that she hides this lethal intellect behind those knitty needles or behind the gardening gloves.

Caroline: Yes, she does. I don't know if she would ever have used that word. I don't think Christie herself would ever have used that word either. But the actions speak louder than the words perhaps, and she is particularly, I'm thinking of A Pocket Full of Rye. She's very caring and protective towards young women, especially young women in precarious states of employment and so on. All things that we would associate. I think with an older feminist today.

Sarah: And Rachel, from your perspective with your historian's head, how did you view Miss Marple in the context of the time and the way she's perhaps perceived better and now?

Rachel: I don't think she is a feminist, as we would call it feminist.I think she is a Victorian in some of those attitudes that like Agatha and her grandmother. And a clever woman didn't appear clever, so she knows she's the equal of any man, but you wear it very lightly. And I think the appeal of Miss Marple is her wisdom. She has this underlying wisdom and also this sort of detachment so that she can stand back and see things without passion.

And that's really reassuring. The characters, I mean like in Sleeping Murder with Gwenda, she calms the situation down when's afraid she's going mad. And Miss Marple goes, no, dear, let's start from the most basic premise that something happened real. She is this reassuring, matriarchal figure without being a mother.

Sarah: That's really interesting and I'm also interested in way we talk about her being obviously the elderly lady, all this. And Michelle, I wonder if you've got a view on why Agatha Christie made Marple an elderly woman rather than a young girl. What was it about being an older woman that made her so attractive in this role?

Michelle: I think obviously you've covered that, some of that in your book as well, and so I won't tread on that ground. And instead what I will offer is in addition to the fact that she had, you know, strong, older women figures in her life, I would say older women are so much less threatening. They're not likely to, wreck your home, steal your husband, whatever it is that they're perceived in any way, to be much less threatening.

And so I think that's part of the reason, and I wanted to add something about feminism, if I may. You said that Miss Marple really comes to the defence of these younger women quite frequently, and that's really one of my absolute favourite moments at the end of Sleeping Murder. I promise, still no spoilers, but everybody else in the book really, including the main characters basically try to slut shame poor Helen Kennedy to use a modern term.

They actually refer to her as sex crazy, and Miss Marple not only resists that, she actually is not subtle. She stops, she puts her foot down and she says, no, that is not what happened here. She actually says, she wanted to have a good time, which is fine, but also it is not appropriate for these people to be projecting these behaviours onto Helen Kennedy and I love her complete unwillingness to brook this bad behaviour toward Helen Kennedy.

Rachel: On the older woman part, I think there's a real biographical reason why Miss Marple appears when she does. I think it's no coincidence that Miss Marple first appears in a story in 1927. That's the year after Agatha's mother Clara dies, and that's eight years after her grandmother, Auntie-Granny, dies.

I think that Agatha was very shaped by the matriarchal influences in her life. It influenced how she heard things very orally. She was hearing women gossiping away and talking to each other, and I think she wanted that still in her life. And I sort of see Miss Marple as a way of her giving a final gift to her granny.

Because Auntie-Granny in Agatha's autobiography had been this amazingly powerful woman who ran her own home in Ealing. She had this Victorian house. She had a whole household where she's very involved with her maids and having majors round and all that sort of thing, and a really full life. Then at the end, as she gets towards 90 in the First World War, she moves down to Torquay, to Ashfield, and lives with Agatha and Clara.

And she's a diminished figure. And Agatha writes so poignantly about that, about her sort of rose leaf cheeks, tears running down them because she can't knit very well anymore. She drops stitches, she becomes suspicious. I sort of see Miss Marple as her final gift to her grandmother of giving her back agency that Miss Marple is the most switched on person ever. Age hasn't diminished her at all. And to be honest, I think Miss Marple should be an ambassador for Age Concern because, I mean, she's a wonderful, wonderful role model for people. She's wise, she's active, and she is so much more switched on than most young people.

Caroline: Can I also just add a little bit of context of where we are in the golden age of detective fiction? When Miss Marple first appears, 1927, late 1920s, detective fiction is incredibly popular. There are a lot of people writing it, and writers are searching for ways to be interesting and original and stand out.

And I think an older woman detective does just that. So there's a little bit, I think of Christie thinking with her commercial hat on. Like, what will stand out? I already have Poirot, I already have a younger woman in Tuppence. What can I add to my stable that will keep publishers coming back?

Sarah: I think all of that is, it's really interesting, isn't it? And I was also thinking, well, preparing for this, that there's a fascinating contrast between her apparent gentleness and the way that she behaves. And the darkness of the crimes that she investigates. I mean, Caroline, you looked at some of this, I know. And I wonder what your take on that is because it's such a contrast.

Caroline: It is and it isn't. I think it is for the reader when we allow ourselves to think of Miss Maple as vulnerable and elderly and therefore weak or whatever. But Miss Marple herself is very matter of fact about this. You know, she talks about evil all the time. She talks about it in Sleeping Murder. And she's often the one in books to remind other characters that no, no, evil is real and it exists, and it's all around us.

So I think of her as being not of the evil of course, but she knows it well. She's seen it a lot in her life, and therefore it's perhaps not that surprising that it's often to be found where she is.

Sarah: Michelle, I wondered if you could give any insight as to why. Agatha saved Sleeping Murder As Miss Marple's final sendoff, obviously, it was written during World War Two, but held back for decades, and I just wonder what your thoughts were on that.

Michelle: I don't know why it was that one, right? I mean, because she had to have one that she saved back and that was the one that got saved back, and then therefore, that was the one that got kept saved back in it.

It leads to the sort of funny anachronism, poor Colonel Bantry is resurrected, which, okay, that leads to a, but it's not awkward. It's fine. We understand as readers what's going on, but it also means, as, as Gray Robert Brown reminded me the other day, right, is that Miss Marple kind of gets two send offs, right? Because she kind of gets a send off at the end of Nemesis as well. Where when we see her walk out of the lawyer's office, there's clearly a goodbye there. But of course we never get the extent of a final farewell with Marple than, than we get with Poirot. And of course people have talked a lot about that as well. Her unwillingness in either of those endings to actually to poor Miss Marple.

Sarah: And how, much, Caroline, I wondered what you think about Miss Marple as being a trailblazer. Was she a trailblazer or was she an amalgamation of things that had been come steaming along the track and gradually kind of ended up being Miss Marple, but as an amateur detective?

Caroline: I think the latter. I think what Rachel was saying about all of the influences in Christie's own life, I think that's absolutely true. She was drawing on these older women figures that she knew. But then in fiction as well, there are some very interesting female amateur detectives in the 19th century, such as created by Anna Katharine Green, for instance, in America.

And there are a few others, well, I'm sorry I'm blanking on the names, but there are a few other sort of lady detectives of different kinds. Not that I'm aware, any older ones, they tend to be more sort of younger adventuring women. But I think the different positions that they end up in, and we know for that. Christie was a big fan of Anna Katharine Green, for instance. I think some of that ends up in Marple. So I see her as a continuation of a tradition that Christie then put her own twist on.

Sarah: From your point of view, Rachel, with your historian's hat on, do you see the evolvement or the evolving of this older woman and the importance of it and her as the trailblazing detective?

Rachel: I think like you've mentioned, Caroline, that really she was doing something that was being different. Again, she was positioning herself in a different place from say, her friend, but also rival Dorothy L. Sayers, who's got strong, very different female character, and Harriet Vane, who I find fascinating to set alongside her.

So I think also in that era, there was more respect for older people than we often have these days. That a matriarchal figure ran a household for a time. and I think that comes across, I mean, I'm interested to pick up on some of the points made earlier about the positioning of Sleeping Murder as well, because I think now HarperCollins place it sort of more in after The Moving Finger in the forties.

And personally I think Nemesis should be seen as the last one because I think in that she explores so many really major issues that have preoccupied in Agatha's fiction for many years. She plunges into what makes someone earth so-called juvenile delinquent. So are people born bad or become bad, you know?

So I think for me, Nemesis should be seen as the final one, although Sleeping Murder was the one that was released.

Sarah: Also, just coming back to you, Michelle, I just wondered where you think Miss Marple stacks up against some of the other heavyweight women that Rachel has just talked about. So those in crime fiction of Dorothy L. Sayers, P.D. James', Cordelia Gray, or those, the modern forensic sleuths that we have. Where do you think she stacks up amongst some of those?

Michelle: I'm obviously going to say she always comes to the top of the heap, because you're never going to get a different answer out of me for that. But I think for staying power, I mean, the, just the fact that we're still reading it, I think for consistency, I think for realism, right?

Miss Marple herself is willing to own her flaws, as well as the next person. Which is I think one of the things that we really love about her. But the fact that even when you go back and you say, but she doesn't do forensics, and then you go back to Murder at the Vicarage and you realise that she's doing geology, chemistry, ornithology, zoology, and you're like, oh, wait, whoops.

So no, no matter who we try to place her in dialogue with, she can at least meet where they are, if not best, which is extraordinary given when she was written in the context in which it was done.

Sarah: And Caroline, do you, see that as well, because you have this wide umbrella view of detective fiction and women detectives as well. And within the Christie genre, where do you think she sits?

Caroline: I think one of the most important things about her is that she's so entertaining. I think sometimes we lose sight of that a bit when we're talking about Christie, because there's so many other things to praise. But she was fundamentally very good at writing books people wanted to read and continue to read. I think lots of the other writers we've mentioned, for instance, Dorothy L Sayers' Harriet Vane. Very interesting character, wonderful writer. Only four books. And some of them are better than others, so when you start measuring her against others, there's always something else. Something. Either there aren't very many books or the character's not in all of them, or doesn't feature very heavily. I think there's only two Cordelia Gray books. So for consistency, longevity, and entertainment, Miss Marple is the best.

Sarah: She ticks all those boxes. She does, doesn't she? She absolutely does. And Rachel, how revolutionary or perhaps even conventional was the figure of Miss Marple when she was created?

Rachel: I mean, I have to say again that I think Miss Marple is a very conservative, small c character. Her view of the world, that people are depraved and you must think the worst of them, that is a conservative small c view. And her attitude, is although she is breaking new ground, I mean, I think of her as someone who is for stability, for stable values, those sort of things, rather than really breaking new ground other than in a very subtle way that, you know, she is a cleverest person in the room.

I think the longevity of her though is about, we all put on her what we want to put on her, because I've been rereading for this, all her novels, the novels about her, and there aren't that many facts. They're quite clear the facts. She's portrayed as a fluffy lady who can be dithery, but underneath she has very, strong views and a very, very strong moral compass, and comes in like an avenging angel.

There aren't loads of details and you can suddenly find out that she went to finishing school in Florence, or she grew up in a cathedral close, but you're not overloaded with information about her. So I think we all bring to Miss Marple our own characters, maybe our own granny figure or whatever. And I think that has helped make us such a popular figure in fiction.

Sarah: Caroline, I'm interested as well because here we are so many years later talking about Miss Marple, as you were saying, Michelle, you know, we're still here, still talking about her. I'm just wondering as an audience here, we are all keen to learn more about her, but why do you think audiences remain so fascinated by detectives who solve crimes perhaps through conversation?

Not car chasers. She never needed a car chase, did she, to get to any point. But it's conversation, observation, and psychology that she's really good at. Why do we remain so fascinated by that, do you think?

Caroline: I think it's two things, and the two things are contradictory. The first is that it feels approachable.

I can't drive in a car chase or perform amazing forensic science, but I can talk to people, I can listen to them, I can observe them. So it feels like something I could do if only I were better at it.

And then on the other hand, I know I could never do it as well as she can. So there's that sense of marvelling at an expert. So I think for that reason, the fact that it feels approachable and yet so much better than me is part of the appeal.

Sarah: Do you think we could, or anyone? I say we, I could never do it, but if anyone could write a character like Miss Marple today without making her seem nostalgic or quaint?

Caroline: I think it would be very difficult. I think even in the crime fiction that's coming out in the 2020s, that is very golden age influenced, I still think there's something fundamentally quite nostalgic about it. It has to be referential. You can't really write it separately, not least because your readers know who you are referencing.

So even if you're trying to be separate, you're not. So I think that's very, very difficult. But I don't think there's anything wrong with nostalgia. I think there is something fundamentally comforting about detective fiction for all that it's about murder and nostalgia is part of that. It's a reason why a major theme across all of Christie's work is memory and the unreliability of memory, and who remembers? I think even in today's crime fiction, we remember generations past.

Sarah: And that's a fundamental part of Sleeping Murder, isn't it? And Michelle, then I, we've, Caroline's just talked about the comforting factors, you know, and the nostalgia. And I just wonder if you could give us a sense of how important you think the location is of the village setting, the domestic setting, the apparently ordinary world in which all these terrible things are happening.

Michelle: Well, I appreciate having the opportunity to answer that question as an American right, because that adds to my answers. So, one of the things that I was surprised by the very first time I came to the UK was experiencing in real life places that to me, even if I cognitively knew they were real places, I had not actually had an embodied experience of, they weren't actually real to me in a lot of ways.

They only existed on the page. So the first time I saw Paignton, the first time I saw Newton Abbott, and I was like, oh my goodness. And the first time I saw what a village looks like and actually to be in one as opposed to just seeing one on television. So in some ways, I'm not having the experience that the intended reader was meant to have.

People who were very familiar, who understood intrinsically all the social structures, all the norms of behaviour, all the kind of psychogeography, Sarah, I know you're here somewhere, of what's happening in those spaces. But because most of her audience is global, that's actually true for the vast majority of her readers, right?

When we think about the number of her books that have been sold, the number of languages into which they've been translated, and the number of countries in which they are read, it means the vast majority of people who read her fiction are experiencing early 20th Century British village life as a complete outsider, and it offers a level of consistency from book to book, which means that I can read The Moving Finger and it gives me a framework in which I can continue to operate in which then she can lay out a mystery that I can proceed through in a way that offers me comfort. But my answer is going to be completely different from the answers of people who grew up in a different place.

Sarah: Yeah. Caroline, what's your view then of the importance of the setting? Because that's a really interesting perspective from you, Michelle, isn't it? That as somebody who's outside of the English setting. You've got to work really hard, haven't you, to try and work out, and so there are no shortcuts for you. You've absolutely got to pay attention to, what's going on. Whereas for those of us who are used to the setting, the village setting or the closed community, that's not the case. What, what are your thoughts, Caroline?

Caroline: I think Michelle's right. I think Christie wasn't thinking about people who were unfamiliar with it. She intended it to be recognisable and familiar to the reader. For the reader to fill in the gaps that she leaves, you know, to finish painting the picture in their mind so that she didn't need to do exhaustive description or a lot of explanation because everybody knows what an English village is like, right?

I think that's what she was imagining and weirdly though the fact that she doesn't describe, for instance, we don't know where St. Mary Mead is. It's not based on a real place. It moves counties through different Miss Marple novels. Even she's not even fictionally consistent with herself.

It just doesn't matter. The fact that it is a bit unmoored and unspecific, I think probably makes it a bit easier to exist as a fictional place that people who don't come from a place like that can recognise and paint in their mind. It's a really interesting phenomenon. I worked on during the pandemic, I worked on this project to make a map of Agatha Christie's England, and it's weirdly very hard to do because she's so unspecific.

I spent a very long time trying to nail down what are the real place analogues, and most of the time, you have to look very hard or say, oh, it's influenced by, because she's just very unspecific. She's working in ideals and archetypes.

Sarah: That's so interesting, isn't it? It's like a time traveller. Rachel, what are your thoughts?

Rachel: My thoughts are rather different because I'm coming from the opposite perspective. Because I'm a Torquay girl. So when I read her novels, I sort of recognise it really It is still in the community here. And I absolutely love reading her autobiography because I can still walk along those places along by Meadfoot Beach, along the Lincombes, and it is a very recognisable community still here.

So for me, even St. Mary Mead, I know it's not somewhere specific, but it, I think, links Meadfoot and St. Mary Church in Torquay even, which is quite a villagey place. And the characters there, they're very identifiable still. I think, you know, I can understand that it's different for people coming from say America, or if you maybe live in a city, but coming from Torquay, it does seem very, very familiar to me reading about St. Mary Mead, and I think perhaps things change more slowly here and I love being able to identify bits of it in Sleeping Murder. I mean, one of the bits I really like is it ends at the Imperial Hotel looking out across the bay, and Torquay was so important to Agatha, and I think we get that because such a large proportion of the autobiography is about her childhood, this golden time when she lived in Torquay.

Caroline: It is very funny in Sleeping Murder that Torquay is a real place and then the rest of the places are not real. It's almost a bit like we, we spend most of the time in this place called Dilmouth. Which, I mean, it's probably Dartmouth, but she chose not to call it that. And then at the end of the book, oh, we drove to Torquay. Oh, right. Okay. So suddenly we're in the real world.

Sarah: Get on the old A380. I'm interested when we look at Miss Marple and we've identified some of her characteristics, some of her skillset, some of the things that make her so appealing to us as readers, I wonder, Michelle, if you've got any thoughts on if modern female detectives that we see either on the screen or on the page, whether they've inherited anything from Miss Marple.

Michelle: I'm probably not the best person to ask, answer that question honestly, because I mostly read Agatha. So I'll gladly pass this to Caroline.

Caroline: I mean, I don't either, but I'll just say Jessica Fletcher, Murder, She Wrote? I think there is no Jessica Fletcher without Miss Marple.

Sarah: So again, we are looking at the kind of attributes that have have belonged to Miss Marple then, but some female detectives, when we look at the more modern one, they tend to be portrayed as being quite tough. Quite physical. Now we've talked about the physicality, Michelle, you've mentioned that, and that's something I hadn't really thought about before, today, but you know, others, have to be quite tough.

You've got some in Prime Suspect, and then you've got The Thursday Murder Club, so you've got quite a range of female detectives. Rachel, what's your view?

Rachel: I think the big change is that Miss Marple's an amateur, and now so many of them are procedural and they're professionals. You know, women can now be Chief Constable.

It's a really different world in that way. So it doesn't, obviously, in some ways the what's called cosy crime that's made now, things like The Marlowe Murder Club and things like that. They hark back to that and I think, you know, that we all really enjoy that. You know, it's cosy, but a lot now is as well, much more obviously overtly violent than anything you'd get in Miss Marple.

I think the thing we can enjoy about Miss Marple is it doesn't have scenes of torture. It is lightly alluded to it. We are interested in the cleverness of the plot and the psychology there, but things are so graphic now. I mean, it's a very, very different world looking at it.

Michelle: One of the things I do think we see a little bit more consistently as well is this lack of a stable adult relational life for a lot of these women though, right? So, I mean, not a partner, not a marriage, and when there is, it's often in order to explore the problem rather than just as a thing. And that was part of actually what made the Coen Brothers movie Fargo back in the nineties so transgressive, right? Because Francis McDormand's character is this rural sheriff in North Dakota, and she's not only happily married, she's also pregnant through the entire film. And her husband is delightful and supportive and just kind of rolls within and the whole world kind of went.

Caroline: Yes, I completely agree about that.And I also think something else about that character is that she's so nice. She's nice all the time to everybody including obvious criminals. You know, she's polite. Even when the guy's feeding the man into the wood chipper, she's like, hey there, but she's not weak.She's effective, but she's nice. And, that kind of a strong femininity is really interesting.

Sarah: I'm curious to know whether you think with that sort of modern, female detective in mind, whether you think Miss Marple would cope with social media. How would she, deal with everything today, do you think? Because the gossip is still there, but maybe on knitting still there, but maybe YouTube tutorials. I don't know. What do you think?

Caroline: I don't. Personally, I think she just avoid all of it and she continued to learn, things the way she always has. I think there's, drawing on my mother-in-law, for instance, who was a teacher in her village, three generations came through her hands. Everyone she meets knows her. She can find out more by sitting at the bus stop for 10 minutes than anyone could on Twitter. So I think Miss Marple's skills are still quite effective.

Michelle: Yes. And I think the other thing we know about Miss Marple, right? we know that she, for example, reads film gossip magazines, right? She wasn't averse to using popular media to learn things when she got curious. So I don't think she actually would've completely avoided it. I think in the same way that, you know, they would've used social media to schedule the meetings at the church and you know, and probably then engaged in a little bit of back channel conversation about what was happening

Caroline: Facebook.

Michelle: Right, right, right. So maybe not completely up to date in terms of her social media use all the time. My guess is that she wouldn't have avoided it completely, because I always got the sense from reading that she was just a little more open-minded than that.

Sarah: It's interesting, isn't it? When we look at it with our modern perceptional, sometimes we look at it through our, you know, with our own perspective.

I'm curious, Rachel, when we think about that and we look at it through our modern day lens, the ideas about women and authority over time, and even in the time that Christie was writing changed and I wonder if, that affects the way that we read Miss Marple today.

Rachel: I mean, I think, you know, the roles of women have obviously totally changed with feminism.

The roles that were open to women when Agatha started writing were really limited and, to take the position she was taking as an unmarried woman at that time, after the first World War, when there were so many surplus women as well, she carved a niche for herself very clearly there.

But I mean, I think she went on into the seventies and you get, you pick up in the later novels that she's looking at society and not really understanding it. She writes about the new development and that community isn't the same anymore, and that new people could come into your area and you don't have that backstory about them to know about.

And so I think she was trying to make sense of the world. And found it hard at times, but she did try and move with it, as you say, you know, that she did try and read the gossip magazines, did try and do that, but it was a world that she didn't totally understand or totally approve of. That's how I see her role.

Sarah: And on that tack, really, Michelle, I just wonder from an academic point of view then. If the thinking about Christie and her female characters have changed over time, because obviously there's an overlay of understanding of a change in the way that we perceive things.

Michelle: Well, I mean, I think that's mirrored by the larger, just kind of the larger change in how academia has been willing to understand the kind of fiction that Agatha Christie wrote both an understanding of genre fiction or not.

Highbrow literature, in general and the important role that it plays in reading, but also in terms of people's production of thought. Then even that to say that not all popular genre fiction is created equal, which is why it's Agatha Christie's works. That got added onto academic reading lists, and it's Agatha Christie's works.

That became the topic of doctoral thesis. It wasn't anybody else's. So it, I think there's kind of a two-pronged thing there. I think there's the additional recognition of something other than the accepted canon of literature. But then I think there's also this recognition that even if we're going to be a lot more broad minded about what we accept as an object of study, that Agatha really rises to the top within that.

Sarah: And there's one final thing for me, and then we'll open up the, floor to questions. if that's ok. One of the key themes of Sleeping Murder is that concern about becoming mad, going mad. And that chimes in lots of other Christie novels too, doesn't it? And Rachel, I just wondered if you had any views on that in terms of the way people's psychology and their mental health was perceived and portrayed.

Rachel: I think that's a very good point. I think Agatha was very concerned about mental health and as Lucy Worsley's biography of Agatha shows, a number of people in Clara's family did suffer from severe mental health problems. A couple of her relatives then ended up in what were called asylums, and there was this feeling of perhaps bad blood sometimes.

And, you know, I think Agatha kept very abreast of these things. She knew all the Freudian information. She knew about Jung. She was reading all these things, but she wears it lightly in her books. And I think it's interesting that you've got, she looks at psychiatrists and there's a psychiatrist, I think it's Penrose in Sleeping Murder and Maverick in They Do It With Mirrors and she's very sceptical about it. Miss Marple's much more down to earth and sort of said, I don't think we should over pathologise things. And obviously Agatha's own experience after the disappearance in 1926 made her aware of what it was to have a very serious breakdown. And it's a recurring theme, right the way through her work from her first story, House of Beauty, which has someone going mad to her later ones like Nemesis.

And it's a leitmotif throughout her work, which is a preoccupation. And for me, the image of the gunman, which was something Agatha saw in her childhood dreams, I wonder if that refers to madness of someone who looks familiar to you, but their eyes aren't right. And I think there's probably a doctoral thesis in that one, but I hand that over to someone younger to do that one.

Sarah: Michelle, I wondered if you had a thought on that because of your academic research.

Michelle: Actually, I wanted to draw out an example from the text of Sleeping Murder that it just struck me this morning and I have no idea how it could possibly have just struck me for the first time today.

So there you go. But this is why we reread, right? Is that there's a, a scene in this where a mother talks about observing a behaviour in her very young son, that shows a recognition that a very calm, collected, quiet child can have an experience that causes them to act in a way that is irrationally violent for a brief period of time.

And I realised, of course, we see the same scene in Death Comes as the End, where the mother sees a son who has been the calm one, suddenly have basically, you know what we might in modern terms call a temper tantrum, but really events violence toward a sibling. And the recognition of the danger and I think it overall shows that what we see all the time is this recognition that people are always perilously close to operating in a way that would not be perceived by others as sane. And I also like the fact that's a red herring because in one of those books, it turns out that you need to pay really close attention to the fact that the child was violent. And in one of those books, it turns out that it was probably fine.

Sarah: So many themes, so many areas to discuss. I'm conscious I've been asking all the questions, so I'm very keen to give the audience a chance, if they've got a question.

Audience Member: Hi. Really wonderful. I totally agree. There's no Jessica Fletcher without Miss Marple just to start with that. but I've always thought about Miss Marple that one of the amazing things about her is that she's not just an amazing detective in spite of being old, that she so often solves crimes because she talks about, oh, this happened to me in this other village, and I remember this thing, and it strikes me that it's kind of extraordinary that her kind of her superpower is that she's old and I'm in interested in the panel's thoughts on that? Like I'm sure this is not an original thought, but...

Caroline: Yes, I completely agree that she's drawing on a lifetime of experience, a lifetime of experience in a village. And a lot of the time that's what gives her the first clue, gives her the first idea. And I think that's such a gift to a writer. I think when Christie was thinking about it in a more meta sense, what she wanted out of the character was just someone with long life experience. There's so much more to write about. So much more interesting. So I think it, among many things, it's a savvy decision on an author's part to use a character like that.

Rachel: Again, rereading the novels, it made me want to know more of her backstory, really. Has she always been able to be so detached? I mean, has she had some passion there in her life? I want to know more of how she's got to become this really wise woman. But I think we see this in everyday life, don't we?

That people who get to their seventies and eighties do have this real wisdom and something that can be really offered to younger generations. So for me, I'd love to know more of what's made her become this, and has she always been such a cool, dispassionate person.

Audience Member: Hi. thank you for the wonderful discussion. Michelle, I was wondering if you could say more about that sort of change and how the genre of fiction and detective fiction has been undergoing. And I, was really interesting that you, you made that like a two-prong thing where like how we look at Christie is actually how we. You know, is actually different than how we look at, you know, the genre of fiction in general. I was wondering if you could just elaborate on that a little bit more.

Michelle: Sure, and I think it, I think it really varies probably from country to country as well. I think, you know, globally, I think there are some pretty big differences there in what is willing to be taken as an acceptable object of study and in what way?

So, for example, you might see people who are much more willing to accept the study of genre fiction if we're also gladly using it to pathologise some population that the reason they act like this is because they ingest this kind of fiction. So I think there are some cases in which it actually becomes, a dangerous approach actually, that it can be used, inadvertently further to marginalise or sometimes advertently further to marginalise.

But I think when the best of it is happening, it's, yes. We read Thomas Hardy, we read Jane Austen, and we also read Agatha Christie. We also read Anthony Horowitz and and the reasons that we read those things are not entirely separate from one another.

We are always reading, hopefully to learn as well as to be entertained. And just because different kinds of books may appear in different places on that spectrum, and even the same book may appear in different places on that spectrum, at different times in the life of a reader, I think is really important.

Audience Member: Thank you, wonderful talk. Gwenda Reed is like a one in a long line of young women in Christie, who, they have childhood trauma, they lose their parents, they have repressed horrors. And I wondered if you could speak a little bit about that and how that might relate to Christie herself, who also had some difficulties in her childhood, losing her father, things like that.

But that's to me one of the most interesting aspects of this novel, the psychological look at a child's mind and how that takes you to pa to adulthood.

Caroline: I completely agree. When I was rereading this novel for the first time in some years to prepare for this, it was Gwenda Reed that really stayed with me. I don't think I'd really noticed her in quite the same way.

And you're completely right that study of childhood psychology almost repressed memories is the whole book. That's the whole reason it works. She turns the whole plot on it. But something that really struck me about Gwenda is that while simultaneously trying to distance herself from mad flights of fancy and say, I'm not mad, I'm not mad, she is also a really imaginative person.

She has these little passages that are almost like intuition. You know, she meets someone, say, Major Erskine for the first time. On one level, she's just listening to him talk and hearing what he's saying. But on the other, she's kind of picturing what it was like when a scene that she never saw, when he met Helen and what they would've been to each other.

And it's almost like she's having visions or something like that, which is exactly the kind of thing she doesn't want to be having. Because she's not mad. So I think it's so interesting that Christie gives her something approaching psychic power as well. At the same time saying, no, it was all real, what she saw, you know, she's not mad at all.

Rachel: I think you are absolutely right about the biographical link, because Agatha was just 11 when her beloved father died. And she said that was the end of her childhood in a way. And after that. She'd have sort of fear at night. She'd go along, creep along the corridor and listen to make sure her mother was still breathing.

It was the end of her peaceful time. But I think also childhood trauma even more was how she saw her mother's childhood. Because her mother, Clara, was taken away from her own family because her father had died. So she left her family home with her mother and brothers and was taken to live with her aunt, Auntie-Granny, who was much richer and could, in theory, give her a better childhood materially. And that really affected Clara forever. It undermined her confidence and gave her a sense of never really belonging. So I think that, psychology of the children and childhood belonging is something that happens again and again In Agatha's book, she looks at it and says, you know, those years are formative.

Audience Member: I was wondering if you could compare Miss Marple to two other older female detectives, Miss Silver by Patricia Wentworth and Gladys Mitchell's Mrs. Bradley. They're very similar and were writing at the same time, and I'd like to hear how you compare them.

Caroline: Sorry, I didn't quite catch that. You want us to compare Miss Marple to Miss Silver and Mrs. Bradley? Yes. Mrs. Bradley is reptilian and terrifying, and she definitely operates on sort of shock tactics. I think, you know, she likes to say outrageous things, do outrageous things, and then see what people do. Miss Silver is much subtler. She's much closer to Miss Marple, but she is a bit more professional. You know, she has, she has an office in some of the novels where people come and engage her in that sense. So I think her dynamic is different. She's not like Miss Marple is having to, and we see her do this in Sleeping Murder, where she gets Dr Haydock to provide her with a pretext to go and take part in the case.

Miss Silver's, you know, she's just been called in, so of course she can investigate. So they have very, very different investigative styles, but they're all ultimately very good at what they do and they all get results, as they say.

Audience Member: On a comment by Caroline, but anyone may jump in. it just dawned on me, do we know if Agatha Christie had originally written the last scene to be taken place specifically in Torquay? Or could that have been something that Rosalind changed herself and also the Imperial Hotel to make it more specific, knowing it was going to be her last published case?

Caroline: I don't know what the editing process for Sleeping Murder was. It's certainly possible that Rosalind or somebody else made additions or changed things. Certainly. I think it's also just possible that, like you say, Agatha really loved Torquay and she wanted it to have its moment. The Imperial Hotel was very important to her.

I believe that she spent her honeymoon there. It was the Grand, sorry, she was the Imperial at a different time. Anyway, so I think, you know, she just wanted to show people her place in the way quite why though. She otherwise preferred fictionalised versions of places? I'm not entirely sure.

So it is interesting and as I say, a little bit jarring that she does that in terms of Sleeping Murder, coming last. Is that what, what you meant? Yes. Yes. So I don't know that she knew how long she was going to hang onto it. I think that's the, it wasn't like in 1942, she put it away and said, no one will see this until the 1970s.

I believe they had to change the title twice. I think I'm right in saying it was definitely called Cover Her Face for a while, which makes total sense with the Webster quotation. And then P.D. James released a novel with that title, so they had to change it. And I think that happened one other time as well.

So I think if she'd sat down in the 1940s and said, I'm going to write a novel no one's going to read until 1976, she might have made different choices. But she didn't know that when she did it. And that's partly what's so fascinating about it. Something I picked up on this most recent reread is there's a reference to the Princess Elizabeth and Margaret Rose in the novel and the king, by which I think she means George VI, which of course by the time anyone was reading it, he had not been the king for quite some time, and Princess Elizabeth was queen now.

So that fixes it in time a little bit as well, it as pre 1953. So yeah, she would've done things differently if she'd known.

Audience Member: I couldn't pass off the opportunity to invoke the notion of Dark Marple, which is something that the podcaster Catherine Brobeck on a podcast called All About Agatha came up with.

Caroline: Kemper.

Audience Member: Yes, it's Kemper, and it's just a brilliant theory of hers. I remember arguing with her about it actually when she first proposed it because it was so audacious. But I think my mistake was taking it too literally, the idea that Miss Marple could actually be physically dangerous that she was going to murder someone, which is something that many characters bring up throughout the canon.

But the idea that there's something subversive, threatening in what she's doing and that she 100% knows that I was just wondering if you could comment on the notion of Dark Marple.

Michelle: Yeah,I have always been here for dark Marple. And specifically in that subversive sense, and to me that it, it actually goes back.

I, I always love her in dialogue with young women, and I mean, I, in this case, we see her in explicit dialogue with Gwenda. We see her in a, a sort of mental, um, what, what turns out to be kind of a conceptual dialogue with Helen. You know, much, much, much earlier in the cannon. We see her in that beautiful dialogue with Jane Hellier, in the Affair at the Bungalow.

And I think any, anytime we see Miss Marple signalling to young women that they don't have to do things the way the world might be, making them feel that they have to do things, I think is a really important part of her subversion. And it's not like she's ever doing it in a way where she's like. You know, you should go out and, you know, murder people and do drugs and whatever it is.

But she's, always just really trying to let people know that the box that they might feel that they have been placed in is not the box. And I think that's the most subversive thing she does.

Caroline: I just add to that, um, Lucy Eylesbarrow, how well she gets on with Lucy Eylesbarrow in 4.50 from Paddington and how she admires that she's broken the mould and, you know, she's a very successful entrepreneur in a way. Miss Marple loves that.

Rachel: I think there's a very interesting quote about her Nemesis where at the end, the home secretary says, gosh, she's the most frightening woman I've ever met. And why is that? Do we think? You know, I mean, I think she's a bit this avenging angel who comes in and sees through everyone and everything. You can't hide anything from her eagle eye.

Sarah: And long may that continue, is what I say. And that's all we've got time for, I'm afraid. I, I know there were a few other questions. I'm so sorry we didn't manage to get to them, but I'd like to thank you for being a fantastic audience. But I'd also like to thank our incredible panellists: Professor Michelle Kazmer, Rachel Trethewey, and Caroline Crumpton, for sharing their brilliant insights and helping us celebrate such a formidable detective.

Music

This episode of Shedunnit was produced and hosted by me, Caroline Crampton.

Many thanks to Professor Michelle Kazmer, Rachel Trethewey, and Sarah Ransome for joining me in this discussion, and to the organisers and audience at the 2026 International Agatha Christie Festival too.

You can find links to the books we mentioned in the episode description and at shedunnitshow.com/celebratingmissmarpleandsleepingmurder. I also publish transcripts of every episode including this one; find them all at shedunnitshow.com/transcripts.

If you'd like to hear more conversations about books like this, join the Shedunnit Book Club now at shedunnitbookclub.com/join, because I published a monthly bonus conversation just for members all about the book we are reading.

Shedunnit is edited by Euan McAleece and production assistance came from Leandra Griffith.

Thanks for listening.