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
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.