In which garrulous busybody Heather Badcock corners movie star Marina Gregg at a reception party, boring her to tears; and the next minute, she’s dead! But did the murderer intend the harmless Heather as the victim, or the wealthy and influential Marina? Fortunately for Miss Marple the murder takes place at Gossington Hall in St Mary Mead, and her friend Chief Inspector Craddock is brought in from Scotland Yard to investigate the crime; so Miss Marple has all the necessary access to the facts to crack the case. As usual, if you haven’t read the book yet, don’t worry, as always, I promise not to reveal whodunit!
The book is dedicated “to Margaret Rutherford in admiration”. Margaret Rutherford was a seasoned actress, known for many great dramatic and comic film appearances following her first big hit as Madame Arcati in the film of Noel Coward’s Blithe Spirit in 1945. By 1962, she had already appeared as Miss Marple in the film Murder She Said, with three more Marple adaptations to follow in the next couple of years. This was Christie’s first book not to have been serialised in advance of its full publication in either the US or the UK, although an abridged version was serialised in two parts in the Toronto Star Weekly Novel in March 1963, with the shortened title The Mirror Crack’d. Otherwise, the full book was first published in the UK by Collins Crime Club on 12th November 1962, and in the US by Dodd, Mead and Company in September 1963, also with the shortened title The Mirror Crack’d. The title is a quotation from Tennyson’s The Lady of Shalott, which is quoted as an epigraph.
This is a thoroughly entertaining read, where the old and the new collide, and sparks fly as a result. The clash of traditional and modern is evidenced not only in Miss Marple’s day-to-day life, but also with the old ladies of the village being confronted by modern day America, by having a film studio on their doorstep. You can also see it in people like Cherry, who has moved into the Development but doesn’t like the new types of people, preferring the gentility of the traditional village residents. You can sense Christie reaching conclusions as she writes the book, uncertain as to how the old and the new will live together until she actually explores it in the narrative. She writes some pacey conversation scenes – those between the Misses Marple and Knight, Miss Marple and Dr Haydock, Miss Marple and Dolly Bantry, for example, come to mind, plus – if you already know whodunit (as I sadly did – I find the 1980 film adaptation really sticks in the mind) – you can see how adeptly she deliberately leads the innocent reader up the garden path, with a wilful narrative deceit that’s a complete joy to identify!
We’re back in good old St Mary Mead, where Miss Marple seems to have aged considerably since the last time we met her. Although she’s still grumbling about gardeners, she’s not keeping up with the changes that have happened to her beloved village, and it puts her out of sorts. Even worse, she now has to suffer the indignities of what today we would call a live-in carer. Miss Knight fusses around, talks down to Miss Marple as if her brains were slowing down (which they’re undoubtedly not), makes her milky tea, insists on her having an afternoon nap; and, although she does understand the kindness behind the actions, and she appreciates the advice that she does require a certain level of “looking-after”, Miss Marple resents every minute of it. Even though Dr Haydock, whom we first met in The Murder at the Vicarage, encourages her to keep her brain alive, Miss Knight does everything she can to prevent Miss Marple from catching the local gossip or discovering the details of the local murder, because it will tire her out. But Miss Marple is too used to getting her own way, and detection is oxygen to her, so she does, of course, work alongside the police to discover who killed Heather Badcock.
Although she doesn’t want to be cared for, she does still value a decent housekeeper and cook – so, enter Cherry who becomes Miss Marple’s long-term companion. Cherry and her husband Jim have a house on the New Development, where modern living starts to encroach on the traditionalism of the village. But Cherry doesn’t fit in with the new estates; yes, she likes the gadgets and the convenience, but she doesn’t feel at home there. So when she suggests to Miss Marple that she and Jim could occupy part of the house that never gets used, it’s the perfect solution to Miss Marple’s needs. Miss Knight will be out the door without a moment’s thought!
Other characters from previous novels appear in the book, including Mrs Dolly Bantry, now widowed as her husband Arthur died some time before; they used to live in Gossington Hall, and would host some of the Tuesday Night Club meetings as retold in The Thirteen Problems, and it was on their library floor that The Body in the Library would be found. Miss Hartnell, whom we also first met in The Murder at the Vicarage, is still alive, “fighting progress to the last gasp”. But progress always wins, as evidenced by the Development. And it’s while going for a sneaky walk in the new estate (taking advantage of Miss Knight’s shopping trip) that Miss Marple not only ends up having an unexpected argument with some new residents, but she also trips on the footpath, which is how she meets Heather Badcock, who takes her indoors and looks after her injury. Miss Marple is now definitely of the age where she doesn’t fall, she has a fall.
The other significant person we meet again is Craddock. He’s come a long way since he led the investigation in A Murder is Announced, he’s now a Chief Inspector, but to Miss Marple, and indeed Christie, he’s usually just plain Dermot. I don’t think Christie is ever this familiar with any of her other detectives. Maybe it’s that informality that makes Craddock come across as more of a family friend than a law enforcer. He is brought in to help when it appears that local man, Detective Inspector Frank Cornish, is out of his depth. To be fair, Cornish isn’t given much opportunity to tackle the case before Craddock is called in, and we’re not given much insight into the kind of guy he is.
It’s an enjoyable, brisk read, with some nice observations and conversations, and a clever solution. It does, unfortunately, employ the device of having at least one whopping great coincidence, which is a little disappointing when you consider the book dispassionately. But it’s very well written, and with a remarkably memorable storyline.
Looking at the references, there are, unusually, few locations for us to consider – by far the majority of the story takes place in and around St Mary Mead, which could be a village in Kent or Hampshire, depending on your own interpretation of distance and direction from real places! Apart from that, there is just the occasional London-based conversation. As for the other references, Christie likens the gardener Laycock’s excuses to those of Captain George in Three Men in a Boat, one of the daring chaps who takes the two week river cruise in Jerome K Jerome’s hilarious and still fresh 1889 novel. Marina Gregg is said to have been great in the films, Carmenella, The Price of Love and Mary of Scotland; the first two of these are fancies of Christie’s imagination – unlike Charlie Chaplin, who was said to be coming to the local Hellingforth studios. But Mary of Scotland was a real film, starring Katherine Hepburn, from 1936 – and a flop. I wonder if Christie simply didn’t do her research or wanted to tantalise us with the possibility that Marina Gregg took a leading part in it?
Dr Haydock, encouraging Miss Marple to keep her brain active, suggests she could “always make do with the depth the parsley sank into the butter on a summer’s day […] Good old Holmes. A period piece, nowadays, I suppose. But he’ll never be forgotten.” This is a reference to a vital clue in the Sherlock Holmes story, The Adventure of the Six Napoleons. Interestingly, Christie would use this quote again, in her next book, The Clocks, and in her 1972 novel Elephants Can Remember. It’s also interesting that Haydock, and/or Christie, speculated that the Sherlock Holmes stories might go out of fashion. I don’t think there’s any evidence of that, Holmes remains probably equally as famous in the annals of fictional detectives as Poirot!
In further literary references, Hailey Preston is likened to Dr Pangloss, for his belief “that all was for the best in the best of all possible worlds”. Britannica describes him as “the pedantic and unfailingly optimistic tutor of Candide,” from Voltaire’s novel of 1759. Cherry suspects that Arthur Badcock must have murdered his wife Heather, even though he is a very meek chap: “still, the worm will turn or so they say. I’ve always heard that Crippen was ever so nice a man and that man, Haigh, who pickled them all in acid – they say he couldn’t have been more charming”. Crippen, of course, was hanged for the murder of his wife in 1910, and Haigh, the Acid Bath Murderer, killed somewhere between six and nine people for their money. A nice man, indeed.
“Othello’s occupation’s gone”, says Mrs Bantry to herself after her conversation with Ella Zielinsky. This is from Act 3 Scene 3 of the play, where Othello is in conversation with Iago and he has fed him the lie about Desdemona’s disloyalty. Later Ella herself quotes, “fly, all is discovered” which, it is alleged, Conan Doyle sent in a telegram for no apparent reason, and the recipient did indeed fly. She also remembers the phrase, “the pitcher goes to the well once too often”, which is a variation on a 14th century proverb which means you can push your luck once too far, or that you shouldn’t repeat a risky action too often. And continuing the literary vein, Miss Marple recalls a book “written by that brilliant writer Mr Richard Hughes […] about some children who had been through a hurricane”. She’s referring to A High Wind in Jamaica, dated 1929, and considered one of the best English language novels of the 20th century.
Regular readers will know that I like to consider any significant sums of money in Christie’s books and work out what their value would be today, just to get a feel of the range of sums that we’re looking at. There aren’t many in this book – the chief sum mentioned is that of £500 which was deposited into Giuseppe’s bank account, which today would be around £7500. Almost more interesting, although much smaller, is the admission fee to the Gossington Hall fete, which was a shilling. That’s 75p at today’s rate. Pretty cheap, really.
Now it’s time for my usual at-a-glance summary, for The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side:
Publication Details: 1962. My copy is a Harper Collins paperback, the twelfth impression of the 2002 Agatha Christie Signature Edition, nineteenth impression, dated 2007, bearing the price of £7.99 on the back cover. The cover illustration merely shows a cracked mirror. That’s not very inventive. I could have done that.
How many pages until the first death: 76, but that’s misleading as this edition has 351 pages, which is a little under twice the normal page count in the Fontana paperbacks. So it’s not a long time to wait before things start getting bloody.
Funny lines out of context: Disappointingly none.
Memorable characters: Most of the characters aren’t particularly memorable with the exception of Marina Gregg, the Hollywood star, who brings glamour and exoticism to the otherwise staid confines of an English village.
Christie the Poison expert:
Heather Badcock is killed by the administration of what Christie, in a rare comic aside moment, describes as “hy-ethyl-dexyl-barbo-quinde-lorytate, or, let us be frank, some such name”. It’s a piece of marketing irony that it’s better known as Calmo. Christie is obviously taking the mickey out of some overly complicated chemical terminology – basically, Heather died of an overdose.
There is also some talk of the effects of poison by arsenic; and another person is killed by cyanide spray. When the deaths eventually come in this book, they come thick and fast!
Class/social issues of the time:
We return to the charming world of St Mary Mead to discover that it’s perhaps not as charming as it used to be. Christie uses this book to explore the effect of “the new development” as a blot on the English landscape, inhabited by some decent people of course, but also those that don’t really deserve to live in a village. At least, that’s the sense you get from this book. Perhaps the most interesting characterisation here is Cherry, who has moved in to the Development, where she has a modern home with modern conveniences, all of which she appreciates, but she identifies much more with the old-style village – to the extent of giving up her own modern home to live in an annex at Miss Marple’s. The divisions between the two levels of living are emphasised much more strongly than any similarities between the two.
Christie and Miss Marple both make a play about the phrase, “coming in Inch”, by which they mean taking the local taxi service. Mr Inch hasn’t run the business for years now, but convention requires that they still call it and the driver by the old name. This highlights the desire of the older members of the community – and those who serve them – to keep with the old practices and terminology. Nothing new would really work for them.
But progress is enforced on St Mary Mead, not only by The Development, but also by the appearance of the Hellingforth Film Studios, dragging the community into the twentieth century to a mixture of curiosity and distaste. The likes of Dolly Bantry and Miss Marple rubbing shoulders with Marina Gregg and Jason Rudd is one of the amusing sideshows of this book, and which help give it a little extra flavour.
Christie uses a few words that we wouldn’t use today, and you sense they were used deliberately to push the envelope of acceptable language to see what would be considered funny, or telling, or, indeed offensive. In a fit of xenophobia more than racism, Cherry refers to Giuseppe dismissively as “you know what these wops are like”. Frank Cornish refers to Margot Bence’s assistant as her “pansy partner” with all its pejorative force. And Dr Haydock and Miss Marple talk in terms of people who aren’t overly intelligent as morons. This use of language really stands out today.
It’s left to Craddock to satisfy Christie’s occasional need to knock feminism, in a conversation he has with Miss Marple about the Good Old Days. He remarks that in Miss Marple’s time, women would have been what he calls, “wonderful wives”. “I’m sure, my dear boy, [she replies] you would find the young lady of the type you refer to as a very inadequate helpmeet nowadays. Young ladies were not encouraged to be intellectual and very few of them had university degrees or any kind of academic distinction.” “There are things that are preferable to academic distinctions,” said Dermot. “One of them is knowing when a man wants whisky and soda and giving it to him.” You can sense the crackle of old and new values clashing uncomfortably as they speak.
Classic denouement: Not at all. In fact, it’s not until Miss Marple finally appears at the scene of the crime that she is completely convinced of all aspects of the case, and its solution. There’s no confrontation of the murderer, as that person isn’t present; just a clarification and final understanding of all the details between the investigating team and one of the suspects. There’s no real alternative for Christie than to stage it this way, but you do sense a little potential drama is lost as a result.
Happy ending? The only glint of happiness at the end is that Miss Marple will be rid of Miss Knight and that Cherry will take her place. Apart from that, only sadness remains.
Did the story ring true? There’s one sucker punch of a coincidence, and you get the feeling that if only Miss Marple had visited the scene of the crime earlier, it could have been solved much more quickly. But both the modus operandi of the murder, and the motive struck me as extremely believable.
Overall satisfaction rating: A very enjoyable book, with a good story, and I really like the way Christie uses it to reassess the character of Miss Marple with her passing years, and how old and new lifestyles can (or cannot) co-exist. It’s probably worth more than an 8/10, so I’ll give it the benefit of a 9. Just.
Thanks for reading my blog of The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side, and if you’ve read it too, I’d love to know what you think. Please just add a comment in the space below. Next up in the Agatha Christie Challenge is The Clocks, one of the first Christies I ever read, and I remember as a child being thoroughly confused by it – I remember my mother asking me if I understood whodunit and I also remember lying to her that I did! As a result I’ve never quite come to terms with this book and certainly can’t remember anything about it. Therefore I’m very much looking forward to re-reading it and, as usual, I’ll blog my thoughts about it as soon as I can. In the meantime, please read it too then we can compare notes! Happy sleuthing!