Welcome! In this series, I'm reading and reviewing classic mystery novels. Do they hold up? Are they guessable? Are they still nail-biters?

Our first retro mystery review is Agatha Christie’s The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side. This is a solid Miss Marple mystery, set in good old St Mary Mead. A glamorous Hollywood actress and her third husband have bought a classic English estate and semi-retired to peaceful English countryside. The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side isn’t one of the usual Christie inheritance mysteries, but there’s still a wide cast of characters, which means a bunch of lies and secrets for Miss Marple to unravel.

The central murder is a village woman who happens to attend the Hollywood star’s big party. After she waits in the receiving line to tell Marina Gregg, the Hollywood actress, about how they once met at a charity event years ago, the village woman takes a sip of her drink and just dies, right there at the party.

Did she have a secret enemy? Was her husband cheating… maybe with the nice, friendly widow next door? Or was the poison actually meant for Marina, who has an entire list of exes and enemies?

This one is particularly fun because most of St Mary Mead treats the actress and her husband as a strange and exotic species, not quite a person at all. I mean, fair enough, because Marina picked a sleepy village for her unspoiled, rural English experience. (Of course, Christie readers like us must ignore how many murders pop up in this particular village, ha) The investigation brings up lot of gossip about her past romantic failures, and her other theater friends are ridiculously high-strung and dramatic.

Does it count as a spoiler if the book’s 60 years old now? Well, I have thoughts on the big reveal, so stop reading now if you’ve about to read this one!  The central shock of this story hinges on illness, and the spread and effects of a particular disease, all of which are forefront in my mind because of covid life. So this was a rare Agatha Christie novel where I wasn’t sidetracked by any of the side plots. From the beginning, when a character said she was sick and told to stay in bed, but snuck out against doctor’s orders and went to a crowded event, my pandemic spidey-senses were going off. This doesn’t feel like a charming memory anymore! THAT IS A PUBLIC HEALTH RISK, YOUNG LADY, WHAT ARE YOU THINKING!?!?!? Naturally, that particular piece of information never left my mind, so it just couldn’t come back as a big reveal at the end for me. Also, when the disease was mentioned, I immediately jumped to the absolute worst possibility of contracting German measles, so that wasn’t a shock either. Thanks, covid, for adding such intense health worries to my daily thought process.

Still, this is another fun, complex Christie mystery with no lack of suspects. The plot is full of twists and turns, although it’s probably a lot more suspenseful if you’re not living through plague times, and not constantly alert to risky health behavior and not seeing the worst possible outcome of risky health behavior at all times. Miss Marple’s chatty comments and clever deductions always make for a fun read.

Have you read this one? Did you guess the ending?