The Mirror Crack'd - Agatha Christie [97]
Of note: Nemesis is the last Jane Marple mystery that Agatha Christie wrote — though not the last Marple published.
Best Sellers: ‘The old charm is still there and a good deal of the old magic in plotting, too.’
Times Literary Supplement: ‘Miss Marple is an old lady now, knowing that a scent for evil is still, in the evening of her days, her peculiar gift.’
13. Sleeping Murder (1976)
Soon after Gwenda Reed moves into her new home, odd things start to happen. Despite her best efforts to modernise the house, she only succeeds in dredging up its past. Worse, she feels an irrational sense of terror every time she climbs the stairs…In fear, Gwenda turns to Jane Marple to exorcise her ghosts. Between them, they are to solve a ‘perfect’ crime committed many years before…
Of note: Agatha Christie wrote Sleeping Murder during World War II and had it placed in a bank vault for over thirty years.
Chicago Tribune: ‘Agatha Christie saved the best for last.’
Sunday Express: ‘A puzzle that is tortuous, surprising, and…satisfying.’
14. Miss Marple’s Final Cases (1979)
Despite the title, the stories collected here recount cases from the middle of Miss. Marple’s career. They are: ‘Sanctuary’; ‘Strange Jest’; ‘Tape-Measure Murder’; ‘The Case of the Caretaker’; ‘The Case of the Perfect Maid’; ‘Miss Marple Tells a Story’; ‘The Dressmaker’s Doll’; ‘In a Glass Darkly’; ‘Greenshaw’s Folly.’
The Republican (Springfield, Massachusetts): ‘When it all becomes clear as day, the reader can only say, “Now why didn’t I think of that?” But he never does. Mrs Christie at her best.’
Charles Osborne on The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side
Miss Marple (1962)
In March 1962, a UNESCO report stated that Agatha Christie was now the most widely read British author in the world, with Shakespeare coming a poor second. The tenth year of The Mousetrap ended with a huge birthday party at the Savoy. A cake with ten candles was ceremoniously cut by the author. A new novel was published in time to catch the Christmas sale, and three one-act plays were produced on tour and in London. During the year, Colonel Archibald Christie died.
The novel was The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side. This is not the first time that Agatha Christie had occasion to refer to Tennyson’s The Lady of Shalott:18
18It was quoted appropriately in Dead Man’s Mirror.
Out flew the web and floated wide;
The mirror crack’d from side to side;
‘The curse is come upon me,’ cried
The Lady of Shalott.
The lines are quoted in the novel by Miss Marple’s old friend, Dolly Bantry. When her husband, Colonel Bantry, had died, Mrs Bantry sold their house Gossington Hall (where a body had been found in The Body in the Library) and the land attached to it, retaining for herself what had been the East Lodge. After the huge house had changed hands once or twice, it was acquired by the famous filmstar, Marina Gregg, returning to England after years in Hollywood.
At a fète held in the grounds of Gossington Hall, one of the guests dies after swallowing a poisoned drink. It seems likely that the poison was intended for Marina Gregg, and indeed, shortly before the death of the guest, Mrs Bantry had noticed ‘a kind of frozen look’ come over the face of the famous star. Attempting to describe it later to Jane Marple, she resorted to Tennyson and ‘The mirror crack’d from side to side; “The doom [sic] has come upon me,” cried the Lady of Shalott.’
The Mirror Crack’d (the shortened form of the title under which the novel was published in the USA) is the last of the Agatha Christie mysteries to be set in Jane Marple’s St Mary Mead; in fact, it is the last of the English village mysteries.
St Mary Mead is