They do it with mirrors - Agatha Christie [74]
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
They Do It With Mirrors
Alternative title: Murder with Mirrors
Miss Marple (1952)
The second 1952 crime novel was They Do It With Mirrors. Presumably the title of this Miss Marple story was considered too ambiguous for the United States. ‘What,’ American readers might have wondered, ‘is it that they do?’ The answer has nothing to do with sex but much to do with violence, hence the explicit Murder with Mirrors for the American edition. The novel begins with the elderly Miss Marple reminiscing with one of her oldest friends, one of two American sisters whom she had known when they were all girls together at a finishing school in Florence. Ruth is worried about her sister, Carrie Louise, the unworldly one of the two who is now into her third marriage and living in a huge country house in the south of England which her husband, Lewis Serrocold, has turned into a home for delinquent boys. One of Carrie Louise’s earlier husbands was Gulbrandsen, he whose name was known internationally through the Gulbrandsen Trust, the Gulbrandsen Research Fellowships and so on. And it is a Gulbrandsen, the brother of Carrie Louise’s late husband, who is murdered when he visits the Serrocolds.
No doubt Agatha Christie had the internationally famous Gulbenkian family in mind when she created the Gulbrandsens. Through the utterances of Miss Marple and sundry other characters in the novel, Mrs Christie appears to be sympathetic to the Gulbenkian–Gulbrandsen brand of idealism but less so to that of Lewis Serrocold: ‘Another crank! Another man with ideals…bitten by that same bug of wanting to improve everybody’s lives for them. And really, you know, nobody can do that but yourself.’ That observation was made by Carrie Louise’s sister, but it could easily have been issued from the lips of Agatha Christie herself, whose ideas about self-help were formed early and were to undergo only slight modification throughout her life. La Fontaine’s ‘Aide-toi, le ciel t’aidera’ must have come to her mind as frequently as that Spanish proverb she was so fond of, about taking what you want but being prepared to pay for it.
Miss Marple shrewdly comments upon the English fondness for failure, the habit of celebrating defeat (Gallipoli, Dunkirk, the Charge of the Light Brigade) rather than victory, failure rather than success, and she links it to the coddling of failure, the penalizing of success, which is, as she says, ‘a very odd characteristic’ of the Anglo-Saxon mind. She is not opposed to compassion, but she argues for a sense of proportion. Miss Marple’s views are of help to her when she goes to stay with the Serrocolds to keep an eye on her old friend Carrie Louise, whose life, she comes to fear, may be in danger. There are three murders before the end is reached.
They Do It With Mirrors is perhaps not one of the most stunning of crime mysteries where complexity of plot is concerned, though the actual solution does indeed display Mrs Christie at the top of her form, performing one of those audacious conjuring tricks which infuriate and delight simultaneously when you go back to see how they were done.
That normally reliable guide to crime fiction, Barzun and Taylor’s A Catalogue of Crime, gives so inaccurate a description of the plot of Murder with Mirrors (They Do It With Mirrors), calling it a ‘school story’ in which Miss Marple goes back as an ‘old girl’ and investigates ‘a fatal accident in a gym’, that the authors must have confused it with some other novel of similar title.
A TV movie version was produced