Sleeping Murder - Writing and Publication Process

Writing and Publication Process

It is generally believed that Christie wrote Curtain (Hercule Poirot's last mystery, which concludes the sleuth's career and life) and Sleeping Murder during World War II to be published after her death, and that Sleeping Murder was most probably written sometime during the Blitz, which took place between September 1940 and May 1941. But the Agatha Christie/Edmund Cork and Harold Ober literary correspondence files, currently held at Exeter University in Devon, indicate Sleeping Murder was written early in 1940.

Christie's notebooks are open to imaginative interpretation and coloring in hindsight, and John Curran argues in his book Agatha Christie's Secret Notebooks that Sleeping Murder was still being planned at the end of the 1940s and the beginning of the 1950s. But this argument is not supported by Janet Morgan's biography, Agatha Christie, or by Laura Thompson's biography, Agatha Christie: An English Mystery; both biographers state unequivocally, without further explanation, that Sleeping Murder was written in 1940. Jared Cade provides much greater detailed proof of this in the paperback and e-book versions of his biography Agatha Christie and the Eleven Missing Days: The Revised and Expanded 2011 Edition.

The original manuscript of Sleeping Murder was entitled Murder in Retrospect after one of the chapters in the book. The correspondence files of Christie's literary agents, Edmund Cork and Harold Ober, show that Christie's royalty statement for 15 March 1940 states that the secretarial agency hired by Edmund Cork to type up Murder in Retrospect charged £19 13s. 9. On 7 June 1940 Edmund Cork wrote to Christie advising her that he would have the necessary 'deed of gift' drawn up so her husband Max would become the owner of the unpublished Miss Marple novel. Christie eventually visited Edmund Cork's offices at 40 Fleet Street, London, on 14 October 1940 and signed the document transferring ownership of the copyright of Murder in Retrospect to her husband in consideration of what was termed her "natural love and affection for him". This was before Christie’s American publishers appropriated the title for Five Little Pigs in 1942 (a year ahead of the release of the UK edition that retained the nursery-rhyme title). Christie duly renamed her Miss Marple novel Cover Her Face. One of Christie's notebooks contain references to Cover Her Face under ‘Plans for Sept. 1947’ and ‘Plans for Nov. 1948’, suggesting she was planning to re-read and revise the manuscript. On the basis of these dates John Curran argues that Christie had still to write the manuscript.

But according to Jared Cade and Janet Morgan the manuscript was written in 1940 and Christie did not undertake these alterations until early 1950. After arriving in Baghdad with a heavy cold and feeling very ill for a fortnight, she traveled to Nimrud and drafted most of the book that became Mrs McGinty’s Dead. She also thought about plans for another Mary Westmacott novel and wrote to Edmund Cork saying that, as she was well ahead of her normal writing schedule, she had gone over the Miss Marple novel thoroughly, ‘as a lot of it seemed to have dated very much’. She had removed all the political references and remarks that emphasized the period, although she stressed that the story must remain set in the 1930s, as so much of the action depended on houses with plentiful servants, ample pre-war meals and so on. She observed that it was especially catchwords and particular phrases that seemed to make a book old-fashioned. On rereading this one she thought it was quite good, and she added she was not sure her writing talents hadn’t gone downhill since then.

Following the publication of P.D. James's début crime novel Cover Her Face in 1962, Christie became aware of the need to think up yet another title for her Miss Marple book; she duly wrote to Edmund Cork on 17 July 1972 asking him to send her a copy of the unpublished Miss Marple manuscript and a copy of Max's deed of gift. So much time had passed that she was unable to remember if the manuscript was still called Cover Her Face or She Died Young. On page 509 of her autobiography Christie refers to the last Poirot and Miss Marple novels that she penned during the Second World War by saying she had written an extra two books during the first years of the war in anticipation of being killed in the raids, as she was working in London. One was for Rosalind, she says, which she wrote first – a book with Hercule Poirot in it – and the other was for Max – with Miss Marple in it. She adds that these two books, after being composed, were put in the vaults of a bank, and were made over formally by deed of gift to her daughter and husband.

The last Marple novel Christie wrote, Nemesis, was published in 1971, followed by Christie's last Poirot novel Elephants Can Remember in 1972 and then in 1973 by her very last novel Postern of Fate. Aware that she would write no more novels, Christie authorized the publication of Curtain in 1975 to send off Poirot. She then arranged to have Sleeping Murder published in 1976, but died before the publication.