Miss Marple: They Do It With Mirrors
“People will quite often do anything for money.”
Good morning!
Today, I have a fun Miss Marple book to share with you all in which we get a delightful image of Miss Marple as a young woman and see the lengths she goes to to keep those she loves safe. This is a cast of characters, “house party” type of mystery, and one that I quite enjoyed reading despite the fact that there are a LOT of characters for such a short book.
In They Do It With Mirrors, Miss Marple effects her first “disguise” of sorts when she reconnects with two old friends who she went to school with in Europe as a young girl. We are never given specifics, but it is clear that they had a lot of fun and were very close (and still are in a way). At the behest of her friend Ruth, who is now a rich American socialite, she travels to visit Ruth’s sister, Carrie Louise, pretending to be poor and in need of charity because Ruth feels something is “off” and that Carrie Louise is in danger of some kind.
Carrie Louise just so happens to have been married three times and have heaps of money, but she spends it all on charitable “fads” (usually run by her husbands). There are stepchildren, adopted children, in laws and all sorts of dependents surrounding her from all three of her marriages, and this makes for the kind of delightful muddle of people that make a good “house party” mystery.
Sure enough, after Miss Marple arrives, there is a murder, and Miss Marple uses her sympathetic ear to listen to everyone around and her help the police discover what is really going on. This is the first time Miss Marple is present when the initial murder takes place. I do appreciate how all of these books, while they follow a certain formula and have a specific feeling, still manage to create new situations in every book.
Overall, I did feel that there was perhaps one too many subplots and red herrings among the many possible suspects, and this means that there are times when certain suspicious activities are never satisfactorily explained. With that exception, I still enjoyed this book, and really liked the way that Miss Marple listens to and trusts the gut instincts of those around her.
Adaptations
Unfortunately, as much as I thought the book was fine, these were not my favorite adaptations. Perhaps it is because the cast of characters is simply too large to be a successful adaptation, and so the choices of what to cut and where were sometimes questionable? Or because they were already making certain changes, they chose to make larger changes that were frustrating?
They Do It With Mirrors 1991 – Joan Hickson
One of the things about the Joan Hickson adaptations is that they are almost completely faithful beat by beat to the books. In this one, this exposed some of the weaknesses of a book with a huge cast of characters because without the narrator to remind us of who characters were and what their relationship was, this was even more confusing than the book. Also, there was some of the other issues I have had with these books in that the actors playing characters were not the right ages, and in a multigenerational story, this becomes an issue.
However, I also have to say that Joan Hickson does a great job if being Miss Marple, and I really appreciate that as it makes all of this series watchable! Overall, this was fine, if a bit flat.
They Do It With Mirrors 2009 – Julie McKenzie
While I don’t have a favorite Miss Marple, as I re-watch these back to back, I am realizing that Julie is my least favorite Miss Marple of the lot. She is a good actress, but her Miss Marple feels like she is pretending to act like a little old lady in order to get information rather than actually BEING a little old lady, which doesn’t work for me.
I had a lot of issues with this portrayal. They completely changed character’s motivations and backstories and made Carrie Louise the driving force in her marriage, but they never changed the plot in a way that reflected this relational change, which means the whole thing just ended up feeling even more confusing and not quite believable. Then they have them doing an incredibly racist American Indian dramatic scene which is never explained and totally superfluous and ends up creating racism where none existed for no reason whatsoever.
I will say, they have a backstory for the inspector that I felt did a wonderful job of connecting the title with the plot in a much better way than the book did.
I had fun reading this book, even if the adaptations were not quite what I would have wanted them to be. I’ll be back next Wednesday with a surprise post and the following week, Miss Marple will return with A Pocket Full of Rye, in which she meddles in the life of total strangers!
