Sleeping Murder: Miss Marple's Last Case is a work of detective fiction by Agatha Christie, first published in the UK by the Collins Crime Club in October 1976[1] and in the US by Dodd, Mead and Company later in the same year.

Miss Marple aids a young couple who choose to uncover events in the wife's past life, and not let sleeping murder lie.

Newlywed Gwenda Reed travels ahead of her husband to find a home for them on the south coast of England.

She goes to London for a visit with relatives, the author Raymond West, his wife, and his aunt, Miss Jane Marple.

During a performance of the play The Duchess of Malfi, when the line "Cover her face; mine eyes dazzle; she died young" is spoken, Gwenda screams out; she saw an image of herself viewing a man saying those words strangling a blonde-haired woman named Helen.

She says that she does not believe that Helen ran off, as the clothes packed in her suitcase made no sense (taking an evening gown but not the shoes and belt that go with it).

Gwenda is in the house alone when Dr Kennedy approaches her, ready to kill her by strangling when his attempt to poison her failed.

Miss Marple arrives with a container of soapy solution, which she sprays in his eyes to stop the murder attempt.

Dr Kennedy had strangled his sister, saying the closing words from that play, unaware of young Gwenda at the stair railing above.

Miss Marple explains all this to the Reeds, the full confession from Kennedy and how they should have seen it from the start, from those words in the play (spoken by a brother who had just killed his sister).

Sleeping Murder, like Curtain (Hercule Poirot's last mystery, which concludes the sleuth's career and life), was written by Christie during the Second World War, apparently sometime during the Blitz, which took place between September 1940 and May 1941.

[4][5] Christie's notebooks are open to interpretation in hindsight; John Curran argues that Sleeping Murder was still being planned at the end of the 1940s and the beginning of the 1950s.

[4] 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advising her that he would have the necessary 'deed of gift' drawn up so her husband Max would become the owner of the unpublished Miss Marple novel.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".

She writes that she had written an extra two books during the first years of the war in anticipation of being killed in the raids, for at the time she was working in London.

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.

In Sleeping Murder, she is frequently pulling bindweed from the neglected garden at the Reeds' home, but that may be a cover for searching for the site of the victim's burial.

When the Hercule Poirot novel Five Little Pigs was later serialised in the US in Collier's Weekly from September to November 1941, the magazine's editing board retitled it Murder in Retrospect.

This was also the title used by Christie's American publisher Dodd Mead and Company, presumably in order to capitalise on the recent US serialisation.

James's début crime novel Cover Her Face in 1962, Christie became aware of the need to think up yet another title for the last Miss Marple book.

"[12] Gavin Lambert in the New York Times Book Review of 19 September 1976 said: "Displays Agatha Christie's personal sense of what she calls 'evil,' of murder as an affront and a violation and an act of unique cruelty...

When Marple tells us here that 'it was real evil that was in the air that night,' Christie makes us feel her curious primitive shiver.

[16] The novel was adapted as a set of four episodes of the Japanese animated television series Agatha Christie's Great Detectives Poirot and Marple, airing in 2005.

Claire was a jewel thief and to escape the Indian Police-Detectives, she faked her death and assumed the identity of "Helen Marsden".