Sleeping Murder Adaptations

After reading Sleeping Murder by Agatha Christie, I watched two television adaptations of the novel. The first was the BBC Miss Marple adaptation starring Joan Hickson, originally broadcast in two parts in January 1987. The second was the 2006 adaptation from ITV’s Agatha Christie’s Marple, starring Geraldine McEwan. I enjoyed both of them, but they take almost completely opposite approaches to adapting the book.

And from this point onwards, there are going to be spoilers for the book and both adaptations.

The 1987 BBC version is by far the more faithful of the two. There are changes, but most of them are relatively minor and feel like the sort of changes you expect when adapting a novel for television. For example, Gwenda and Giles are already together when they are looking for their house, whereas in the novel Gwenda arrives in England ahead of Giles and finds the house by herself. The adaptation also condenses the gradual process through which Gwenda realizes that she somehow knows things about the house that she should not know.

But the important parts remain intact. Gwenda lived in the house as a small child. Helen was her stepmother. Dr Kennedy was Helen’s half brother. Gwenda witnessed Helen’s murder without properly understanding or remembering what she had seen, and the investigation is about reconstructing that buried memory and discovering what happened all those years ago.

It is a very straightforward adaptation, and that works. It does not seem particularly interested in reinventing Christie’s mystery. It simply takes the story and puts it on screen, with the necessary adjustments for the medium.

The 2006 ITV adaptation apparently looked at this and decided that what Sleeping Murder really needed was approximately seventeen additional complications.

The basic premise is still recognizable. Gwenda arrives in England and finds a house that feels strangely familiar. She gradually realizes that she lived there as a child and witnessed a murder. Miss Marple becomes involved, and together they begin investigating the past.

Almost everything surrounding that premise, however, has been rearranged.

For a start, Gwenda is no longer married. She is engaged to Charles Vanstone, an older businessman who remains largely absent from the story. Instead, she spends most of the adaptation with his employee, Hugh Hornbeam, who has been sent to help her get settled in England. Hugh is also the person who brings Miss Marple into the investigation.

This change I actually liked.

Gwenda and Hugh work well together, and because they spend the entire investigation side by side, a relationship gradually develops between them. Gwenda is already having doubts about marrying Charles, and by the end she chooses Hugh instead. It gives the adaptation a completely different romantic storyline from the novel, but I thought it was cute. I was perfectly happy to go along with it.

I also did not mind the addition of the Funnybones, a travelling theatrical troupe that Helen performed with. Several characters from the novel are rewritten as members of the troupe, which connects the suspects much more directly and gives the adaptation a slightly different atmosphere. It also brings in another little piece of English social and theatrical life from the period. If you are deliberately making a less faithful adaptation, that is the kind of invention I can enjoy.

And then we get to Helen.

Oh, Helen.

In Christie’s novel, the situation is relatively simple. Gwenda’s mother dies, her father Kelvin meets Helen, they marry, and Helen becomes Gwenda’s stepmother. Dr Kennedy is Helen’s possessive half brother and eventually murders her.

The ITV adaptation decides that this is nowhere near complicated enough.

Here, Gwenda’s mother is Claire Halliday, Dr Kennedy’s half sister. Claire becomes involved in jewel theft while living in India, and when the police begin closing in on her, she and Kelvin fake her death in a car accident. Claire then returns to England, assumes a completely new identity as Helen Marsden, and joins the Funnybones. Kelvin later returns to England with Gwenda, apparently meets Helen for the first time, and the two become engaged.

Except, of course, they have already been married for years.

So Helen is not Gwenda’s stepmother at all. Helen is Claire. Claire is Gwenda’s supposedly dead mother. Kelvin and Claire are essentially pretending to meet and fall in love again so that he can marry his own wife under her new identity.

This is the twist.

And I have seen this episode several times and still had trouble remembering exactly what was supposed to have happened.

There are hints throughout the adaptation, so the revelation does not come completely out of nowhere. But once Miss Marple starts explaining the whole thing, the plot suddenly requires an enormous amount of backstory just to make the twist work. Claire was a thief. Claire was supposedly killed in a car accident. Except the accident was staged. She became Helen. She joined a theatrical troupe. Her husband returned to England. They pretended not to know each other. They became engaged so they could get married again.

Why?

It feels like a twist that exists largely for the sake of having another twist.

It also makes Dr Kennedy’s role considerably stranger. He is no longer Helen’s half brother because technically Helen does not exist. He is Claire’s half brother, which means that when he encounters Helen, he recognizes that his supposedly dead sister is alive and living under another identity. He ultimately murders her because he is obsessively in love with his own sister and cannot tolerate anyone else having her.

That part is retained from the disturbing possessiveness of the original story, but the adaptation turns it into something much more explicit and adds the entire Claire and Helen identity plot on top of it.

Kelvin’s fate changes as well. In the novel, Dr Kennedy manipulates Kelvin into believing that he murdered Helen, and Kelvin eventually dies after being committed to a psychiatric institution. In the ITV adaptation, Kennedy simply murders him too, pushing him from a cliff and arranging things so that his death appears to be suicide.

The ending is also completely different. One of the things I found slightly disappointing about the book was how suddenly Gwenda’s final memory returns and reveals what she saw. The BBC version largely retains the structure of Christie’s story. The ITV version instead goes for the classic murder mystery finale where everybody is gathered together and Miss Marple explains the entire solution.

Considering how complicated the new solution is, they probably needed to sit everyone down just so Miss Marple could explain what on earth had happened.

Despite all of this, I did enjoy the 2006 adaptation. The acting is excellent, the production looks great, and I really like Geraldine McEwan as Miss Marple. She has always been my favourite screen Miss Marple. There is something wonderfully warm and playful about her performance while still allowing Miss Marple to be extremely sharp underneath it all.

Sophia Myles is also lovely as Gwenda, and I enjoyed her chemistry with Aidan McArdle as Hugh. Their relationship gives this version an emotional storyline entirely separate from the mystery, and surprisingly, that was one of the changes I liked most.

The 1987 version has its own excellent cast, with Geraldine Alexander as Gwenda and, of course, Joan Hickson as Miss Marple. It is quieter and considerably less interested in putting its own stamp on Christie’s plot. If what you want is to watch Sleeping Murder after reading Sleeping Murder, this is definitely the adaptation I would recommend. It preserves the mystery and the relationships between the characters without trying to turn them into something completely different.

The ITV version is much harder to judge. I like quite a lot of its individual changes. I like Hugh. I like the romance. I even like the Funnybones and the way the theatrical troupe pulls several suspects into the same social circle. There is a perfectly good alternative version of Sleeping Murder hiding inside all of this.

The problem is that there is simply too much going on. On top of the rewritten central mystery, there is a drugs subplot, secret paternity, a man who is not raising his own biological son, another murder, jewel theft, a faked death and an entirely fabricated identity. None of these ideas is necessarily impossible to follow on its own, but piled together they make the adaptation surprisingly exhausting to watch. I spent so much time trying to keep everybody’s revised relationships and secret histories straight that it became harder to simply enjoy the mystery. Christie’s original story already has plenty of red herrings, but they are different possible answers to the same central question. Here, the red herrings themselves seem to come with their own complicated family trees and subplots.

Then somebody decided that Helen also needed to secretly be Gwenda’s supposedly dead jewel thief mother living under a false identity while pretending to meet and remarry her own husband.

That was one twist too many.

So I enjoyed both adaptations, but for very different reasons. The BBC version is the one to watch if you want Christie’s Sleeping Murder. The ITV version has good performances, some genuinely interesting changes and a surprisingly sweet romance, but it keeps adding complications until the mystery begins to buckle under their weight.

There is a perfectly good adaptation buried somewhere underneath all those twists. I just wish they had trusted it enough to stop adding more.