Agatha Christie: THE MIRROR CRACK'D FROM SIDE TO SIDE

Agatha Christie
THE MIRROR CRACK'D FROM SIDE TO SIDE
351 pages
Harper Collins
ISBN: 0-00-712098-2

After numerous times of watching the movie I finally managed to actually read Agatha Christie's The Mirror Crack'd From Side To Side and I don't know what took me so long. When Heather Babcock dies at the party of movie star Marina Gregg, who just moved to St. Mary Mead, it at first seems like a natural death, but after an inquiry the police finds out that it was in fact an overdose of a drug used by Marina Gregg and everyone living in the mansion with her. But who had a reason to kill her and was it really Heather Babcock who was meant to be murdered? Things start to look different when a friend of Miss Marple tells her that the actress' frozen expression reminded her of Tennyson's The Lady Of Shalott:

Out flew the web and floated wide;
The Mirror crack'd from side to side;
'The curse has come upon me,' cried
The Lady of Shalott.

Dame Agatha once again managed to create a suspenseful mystery and left quite a few questions open until the end.

A noteworthy aspect of Agatha Christie's works is the fact that she only uses the verb "said", while there are many other possible words she could use. Yet, it seems exactly this habit makes reading the mysteries more fluent and much faster. (On a side note: There is a documentary by Ben Warwick The Agatha Project on the special aspects of Agatha Christie's novels which is well worth watching. In it, scientists took a very close look on the novels, analyzed them and show their results with easy to understand explanations.)

Rating: 4.5/5