The Mirror Crack'd from Side to Side

The Mirror Crack'd from Side to Side was published in the United Kingdom in 1962 and a year later in the United States under the shorter title The Mirror Crack'd. It is one of the later Miss Marple novels, written when Agatha Christie was in her seventies, and its setting is a village that has begun to fill up with new houses and new kinds of people. The contrast between the early Marple books and this one is one of the pleasures of reading the series in order.

The novel is a fair-play puzzle in which the reader is given everything the detective has. The party is described in detail, the guest list is small, and the poisoning is arranged so that the wrong person seems to have been the target. Miss Marple's advantage is her memory for what people were like decades earlier, which is the method Christie built for her: a case is solved by knowing the village rather than by examining the scene.

Christie's age and health are visible in the book's treatment of its detective, who needs a nurse and a neighbour to carry on working, and the series ends a few volumes later. The novel was adapted into a 1980 feature film with Angela Lansbury as Miss Marple and a television version in 1992 with Joan Hickson. It is a standalone within the Marple series. The solution turns on a piece of medical information and a chance remark, and the village's long memory of its own families supplies the motive that the police cannot see from the evidence alone, which suits them well enough until the second death.