Book of the Month: Endless Night

Gipsy’s Acre was a truly beautiful upland site with views out to sea – and in Michael Rogers it stirred a child-like fantasy. There, amongst the dark fir trees, he planned to build a house, find a girl and live happily ever after. Yet, as he left the village, a shadow of menace hung over the land. For this was the place where accidents happened. Perhaps Michael should have heeded the locals’ warnings: ‘There’s no luck for them as meddles with Gipsy’s Acre.’ Michael Rogers is a man who is about to learn the true meaning of the old saying ‘In my end is my beginning.’

Agatha Christie’s Endless Night was first published in 1967. Unlike many of her novels which took between three and four months to complete, Agatha Christie finished writing Endless Night within six weeks. Fifteen years after publication in 1972, Agatha Christie described Endless Night as ‘my own favourite at present’ in response to a Japanese translator’s top 10 Christie novels.

The story is narrated by character Michael Rogers, a twenty-something year old male. Despite being in her seventies whilst writing it, Agatha Christie told an interviewer that being Michael, the twenty-something narrator, “wasn’t difficult. After all, you hear people like him talking all the time.” The title of the novel was taken from William Blake’s poem, Auguries of Innocence.

The story was adapted for film in 1972, starring Hayley Mills and Britt Ekland, and later in 2013 as an episode of Agatha Christie’s Marple, with Julia McKenzie playing Miss Marple. It was adapted for BBC Radio 4 in 2008, and later that year a graphic novel version of the story was published.