Miss Marple, Gwenda and Giles Trivia Quiz

Answer: She hears a young man's voice in the hall repeating the name "Helen, Helen."

The account of Gwenda's gradually mounting fears make this mystery fascinating reading from the very first chapter!
Her feelings for the house are very strong from the moment she sets eyes on it, but their nature veers between instant attraction ("Gwenda felt a throb of appreciation - almost of recognition. This was HER house!") and irrational association with horror. She first feels terror on the stairs when she is being shown around the house by the owner. A wave of sickness sweeps over her as she looks down into the hall, and she asks whether the house is haunted.

Once she has moved in and is waiting for Giles to join her from abroad, Gwenda begins making improvements.

Answer: Wallpaper

Very subtly spooky, in Agatha Christie's best manner. When I first read the book years ago, I found this part incredibly creepy. Agatha doesn't need skeletons and bloodstains to disconcert the reader, she manages to achieve it with a wallpaper with bunches of cornflowers and poppies.

Answer: Gwenda is visiting Raymond West, Miss Marple's nephew

Gwenda in a panic decides to get out of the house and jumps at the chance of a visit to London.

She has been invited to stay by Raymond West and his wife, who are described as high brow and rather alarming. Raymond West with his superior attitude and his affection for his dear old aunt introduces Gwenda.

Answer: Yes, one of the servants

It was Lily, the parlour-maid who was then in service at the house.

Lily is a girl who gets her thrills by gong to the cinema too often (she was actually at the cinema on the night of Helen's disappearance and had persuaded Gwenda's nanny to come with her) and by reading about murders in trashy newspapers. Her head is filled with ideas of husbands who "do in" their wives. So when she is informed by Dr Kennedy that her mistress is missing, it is natural that she should suspect that Helen has been killed by her husband and buried in the cellar.

But Lily, although she may be foolish and craving for sensation, does have some slight grounds for believing this. She claims that the clothes that Mrs Halliday (Helen) has apparently taken away with her are not suitable. A further vague reference to something Gwenda's nanny mentioned she had seen out of the window and to a car parked near the house the night of the murder are suggestive.

Answer: Kelvin Halliday found Helen's strangled body in his bedroom and believed that he had killed her.

Gwenda is horrified when she realises that her father, Kelvin Halliday, is the obvious suspect if Helen was really killed.

After meeting Helen's half-brother, Dr Kennedy, she is further upset to find that after Helen's disappearance, her father went into a mental hospital where he died. Dr Kennedy's theory seems to be that Helen's note to say she was leaving him gave Kelvin such a shock that he had a brainstorm and convinced himself that he had strangled her.

When they meet the psychiatrist at the hospital, he confirms this theory. He says Kelvin would prefer to believe his wife was dead rather than unfaithful and this was what caused the delusion that he had murdered her.

It is Giles who suggests the possibility that Helen might have not really been dead but had come round after her husband had semi-throttled her in a fit of jealousy. He also puts forward the theory of X, the real killer who arranges the body in the bedroom for Kelvin to find. This would explain a major query: why does Kelvin think he strangled her in the bedroom (as he wrote in his diary and told Dr Kennedy), when Gwenda saw the murder take place in the hall?

For the rest of the book Miss Marple and the Reeds accept the theory of X and are trying to work out his identity among the suspects they have tracked down.

Answer: Someone else is killed

The victim is Lily Kimble, found strangled in a wood near the station.

Gwenda and Giles had managed to track her down by means of an advertisement n the local paper. Lily is a rather greedy and foolish character, and she imagines she may receive a reward for information given. She writes to Dr Kennedy to ask for advice, and he arranges to meet her at his house. She never turns up for this appointment and soon afterwards her strangled body is discovered.

This is a turning point in the book, for up till now the detective trio have had no actual proof that Helen Halliday was killed. But now it is definite that there is a killer about, and it seems that he or she was desperate to stop Lily from giving away certain clues. What could the clues be? Lily repeats in her letter some confused points about what she saw when she looked out of the window the night of the murder, and the clothes in the suitcase Helen packed being wrong. And who did she arrange to meet when she got off the train on her way to the doctor's?

Answer: Major Erskine

It seems possible that Helen's disappearance may have involved one of "the men in her life", so Giles and Gwenda, with Miss Marple's invaluable help, set out to track them down. They suspect them all equally, or rather waver between believing their accounts of themselves and suspecting them.

Walter Fane, twice turned down in his proposals of marriage, is a quiet man in a lawyer's practice. He claims that he hardly remembers Helen and that one's affairs don't mean much to one after so many years. But Gwenda can't help wondering if that is really so, or whether Walter was madly in love with Helen.

Answer: The murderer was wearing rubber gloves

Giles suggests that Gwenda dreamt the monkey's paws afterwards, but apart from this neither he nor Miss Marple pay much attention to the point. Yet it is a major clue to the murderer's identity.

This particular part of the mystery is only solved right at the end when Gwenda is attacked in a thrilling scene leading to the murderer's arrest. Gwenda has put on some rubber gloves in order to wash up after lunch and then keeps them on when she goes upstairs to wash out a couple of jumpers.

An ordinary cosy domestic setting, in which she is busy with everyday tasks, just as in the first chapters of the book when the menacing atmosphere is built up. It is pure coincidence that she is wearing the gloves and, looking down at her hands, suddenly hears the murderer's voice.

Answer: "I can't see your face. My eyes are all dazzled."

This comes out of the blue and is an equal shock to Gwenda and to the reader!

The words she heard as a child of three: "Cover her face. Mine eyes dazzle. She dies young" are a quotation from "The Duchess of Malfi" (a play by John Webster).

The murderer has no idea that the crime and this quotation have been witnessed. It is just chance that the words "face" and "dazzled" are spoken, in a perfectly innocent context, while Gwenda is also happens to be looking down at her hands in rubber gloves.

She recognises the voice, screams, "It was you!" and the murderer is upon her. If it wasn't for Miss Marple and her bottle of soapy water, Gwenda would have come to the same end as Helen Halliday.

As in countless other of Agatha Christie's books, the identity of the murderer is a complete surprise, though it is hard to determine WHY the reader so rarely guesses it.

Answer: The murderer destroyed Helen's true character by implying she was man mad

Actually several other people whom Giles and Gwenda talk to describe Helen Halliday as flighty or a regular flibbertigibbet. But it is the murderer who created the general idea that Helen was abnormally interested in men, and by letting it be believed that she had run away with another men less than a year after her marriage, permanently damaged her reputation and character.

Some of the people who knew her best don't agree with this opinion of her. For example Edith Pagett, the cook, is firm in her view that Mrs Halliday was as nice as could be.

Miss Marple firmly states her conviction that Helen was never man-mad or a nymphomaniac. She was a perfectly normal girl who wanted to have some fun and meet plenty of young men before settling down with the right one.