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 by Warner Brothers in 1985, as Murder with Mirrors. Helen Hayes played Miss Marple, and the cast included Bette Davis, John Mills and Dorothy Tutin. Under its original English title, the novel was later adapted for television and first shown on BBC TV on 29 December 1991, with Joan Hickson as Miss Marple.
About Charles Osborne
This essay was adapted from Charles Osborne’s The Life and Crimes of Agatha Christie: A Biographical Companion to the Works of Agatha Christie (1982, rev. 1999). Mr. Osborne was born in Brisbane in 1927. He is known internationally as an authority on opera, and has written a number of books on musical and literary subjects, among them The Complete Operas of Verdi (1969); Wagner and His World (1977); and W.H. Auden: The Life of a Poet (1980). An addict of crime fiction and the world’s leading authority on Agatha Christie, Charles Osborne adapted the Christie plays Black Coffee (Poirot); Spider’s Web; and The Unexpected Guest into novels. He lives in London.
About Agatha Christie
Agatha Christie is known throughout the world as the Queen of Crime. Her books have sold over a billion copies in English and another billion in 100 foreign languages. She is the most widely published author of all time and in any language, outsold only by the Bible and Shakespeare. Mrs Christie is the author of eighty crime novels and short story collections, nineteen plays, and six novels written under the name of Mary Westmacott.
Agatha Christie’s first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, was written towards the end of World War I (during which she served in the Voluntary Aid Detachments). In it she created Hercule Poirot, the little Belgian investigator who was destined to become the most popular detective in crime fiction since Sherlock Holmes. After having been rejected by a number of houses, The Mysterious Affair at Styles was eventually published by The Bodley Head in 1920.