Molly and Giles Davis have started running a guest house in the Monkswell Manor. They are very young, very much in love - and also very inexperienced. So they take in their first guests without bothering to find out anything about them. There is the fussy Mrs. Boyle, the blustery Major Metcalfe, the childlike Christopher Wren and the shady foreigner Paravicini. Detective sergeant Trotter of the Berkshire Police is the last to arrive, sent to investigate a murder committed in London. He thinks there is a deranged
murderer among the guests at Monkswell Manor.
And then comes a furious snowstorm, cutting them off from the rest of the world. The telephone line has snapped. Now they must live together
knowing that one among them is a murderer.
As the storm builds up in its fury, the turmoil within the guest house is no less. The relationship between Molly and Giles has started falling apart, each knowing the other has lied, and each suspecting the worst. Why has Giles been so reticent about his past? Why did Molly secretly visit London? What do Paravicini’s insinuations mean? Why does Christopher Wren behave so bizarrely- like a madman? What is the real identity of Mrs. Boyle?
Agatha Christie, the creator of two of fiction’s
best loved detectives, Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple, is at her very best here. The novella brings out the terrible helplessness of six people living under the shadow of a faceless murderer who likes to whistle the opening bars of the nursery rhyme “Three Blind Mice”.
The
play based on this story opened in 1952 in London, and was named “The Mousetrap”. It was immensely popular, and holds the Guinness Book record for being the longest running stage play ever.
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