Sleeping Murder by Agatha Christie
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
In Lucrecia Martel’s 2008 film The Headless Woman, at one point the gardener is digging in the backyard and hits cement; it turns out there’s a swimming pool under there. A classmate suggested that this was the most interesting thing about the film. What’s buried. (For my part, I thought the most interesting thing about the film was that the absolute only soundtrack (I mean sound that’s played to the audience but the characters can’t hear) was a single sustained microphone feedback tone, very quiet and very high pitched–unless I misremember.)
Anyway, that’s what Sleeping Murder is about. Both literally and metaphorically, wickedness has been deeply buried and has to be dug up by the sleuths.
It’s interesting to me how the villain creates a fake world for the sleuths that prevents them from seeing the past correctly, and that fake world doesn’t dissolve until they’ve dug down deep enough to hit the root of wickedness. It’s almost like the Mahayana Buddhist idea of the Veil of Maya.
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