Marple Is Willing

By Martha Duffy

SLEEPING MURDER by AGATHA CHRISTIE 242 pages. Dodd, Mead. $7.95.

It is not for nothing that Dame Agatha Christie used to be called the mistress of the last-minute switch. For years before her death a year ago at 85, her publishers let it be known that they held two novels "in a vault"--naturally--for posthumous publication. The rumor ran that, not wanting any literary hack to mishandle her characters, Agatha Christie had left books satisfactorily killing off her legendary sleuths, Hercule Poirot and Jane Marple. Sure enough, Poirot came to a violent end in Curtain, when it was finally exhumed and published last year.

Now comes Sleeping Murder, the other manuscript that slumbered in the vault for roughly 40 years. It has a switcheroo, all right. The good news is that Miss Marple does not die at all. Instead she was last seen looking out on the harbor at Torquay (where Agatha Christie was born). Less welcome is the news that in this final book she barely comes to life.

One problem is that despite its title, the book is much more an English gothic romance than a mystery. Gwenda, a dim young woman orphaned as a toddler and brought up by relatives in New Zealand, arrives back in Britain with her new husband, Giles. No sooner have they bought a nice house in the town of Dillmouth than Gwenda starts getting attacks of dej`a vu and is clutched by a nameless dread while descending the stairs. It is soon clear to the reader, and eventually even to dim Gwenda, that she has been here before. Just as predictably, as a tiny child she saw a murder from the stairs.

Luckily for everyone, she is distantly related to Miss Marple. The old lady turns up in Dillmouth, and sternly leads Gwenda through the complexities of her past--most of them available to any reader who looks up the quotation from The Duchess of Malfi that the author drops like a stone early in the story.

These doings might be supportable if Giles and Gwenda had only bought property in Miss Marple's home village of St. Mary Mead. Indeed, the biggest mystery about Sleeping Murder is the author's choice of setting. Sturdy though she is, Miss Marple seems off balance in Dillmouth, away from her cowslip wine, her knitting, her garden and especially her friends.

Peonies for Life. How one misses that old supporting cast! Much more than Poirot, Miss Marple inhabits a fixed and lively world. There is her tactless next-door neighbor, Miss Hartnell. "weather-beaten and jolly and much dreaded by the poor"; the wealthy, amiable Bantrys; taciturn Sir Henry dithering, who once ran Scotland Yard; and the village snob, Mrs. Price Ridley. Among Agatha Christie lovers, that lady is justly famous for putting a pound in the offertory bag on the anniversary of her son's death and then severely taxing gentle Vicar Clement when his counts show the largest contribution that Sunday to be ten shillings.

In many of the 15 Miss Marple novels, these people are just swift sketches. But readers savor them. Miss Marple herself is a fairly complex character and the one dearest to the author. She has changed somewhat over the years-- but never enough to resemble the more boisterous, vulgar character played so well on the screen by Margaret Rutherford.

In the early books, like The Murder at the Vicarage, Miss Marple was a snoop as well as a sleuth, "the worst old cat in the village." Her famous garden was a smokescreen, and her fondness for observing birds through powerful glasses could be turned to other purposes. As time passed, Dr. Haydock had to tell Miss Marple gently that gardening was making her rheumatism worse. She became quieter and less flighty. But her methods of detection were always the same. Where Poirot used his "little gray cells," Jane Marple extrapolated from her knowledge of St. Mary Mead. A swindler? She remembers Mrs. Trout, who "drew the old-age pension, you know, for three old women who were dead, in different parishes." A cruel murderer? "Mrs. Green, you know. She buried five children-- and every one of them insured."

The villain in Sleeping Murder is not nearly so enterprising. About all Miss Marple has to do is to keep her dogged young friends from pursuing their own dim-witted plans. What is comforting about the book is Miss Marple's presence and the fact that the author could not bring herself to do her character in.

As Miss Marple once told her friend Elspeth McGillicuddy during a horticultural discussion, "Peonies are unaccountable. Either they do-- or they don't do. But if they do establish themselves, they are with you for life." The old spinster apparently became like the peonies in her garden.

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