Travis Elborough on his new book, Through the Looking Glasses… (including Five Spectacular Crime Novels…)
The mysterious affair of the spinster sleuth’s spectacles Agatha Christie’s much-loved spinster sleuth Jane Marple has what might be said to be a complicated relationship with optical aids. And one muddied by film and television adaptations where reading glasses, along with half-knitted scarves and needles, are often shed out of capacious handbags as metonymic props for the character – the Marple equivalent of the Holmesian pipe and magnifying glass. On television, Joan Hickson, Geraldine McEwan and Julia McKenzie have all, at times, peered imperiously at assorted dim policemen, puffed-up retired colonels, flighty actresses, bearded painters, snooty dowagers, young newlyweds, absent-minded professors, weedy clerks, nosey cooks and slatternly maids through or over the top of spectacles of varying styles, Hickson in half-moons most memorably.
In the books, however, glasses are less of a given. The first full Miss Marple novel, The Murder at the Vicarage, was published in Collins’ new Crime Club imprint in 1930, which Christie would furnish with at least two books a year for the next twenty years. The pace of this output inevitably resulted in some minor inconsistencies in the character across the twelve novels and twenty short stories she graced, some of them ocular. Especially since Christie alternated between Marple books and those featuring Hercule Poirot, the fastidious Belgian detective with whom she first made her name back in 1922, along with writing plays and other stand- alone mysteries and stories. Described as ‘a white-haired old lady with a gentle, appealing manner’, Marple is, according to the Rev. Leonard Clement, the narrator of that first novel and whose vicarage provides the setting for the slaughter, someone ‘who always sees everything’. In this opening book-length case we, of course, only see Marple through his eyes, that device a classic Christie act of misdirection. One that initially obscures the fact that Marple really does have the clearest view of all since her twinkly blue eyes look ‘at the case from an entirely different angle’ to everyone else, our ‘unworldly’ ecclesiastical storyteller included. Here, however, the only glasses this ‘maiden-lady’ detective is credited with owning are the ‘powerful’ ones that she deploys for her ‘habit of observing birds’. Though the vicar suspects that this hobby, like ‘gardening’, is merely a ‘smoke screen’ that allows her to keep an eye on the villagers themselves.
Christie had just turned forty when Murder at the Vicarage was published, and possibly did not yet need to wear glasses herself and so didn’t think to equip her more elderly spinster with them either. While Christie’s fictions continued to be located in a prelapsarian world of swish country houses, high-end resorts and quaint villages peopled by the loaded, leisured and retired, they did, nevertheless, move with the times. Marple, if eternally old, does age a bit here and there. She’s with-it enough to be wearing plimsolls in 1964’s A Caribbean Mystery. And in the following year, in At Bertram’s Hotel, she is even revealed to be around seventy-three or seventy-four years of age. This 1965 offering from Christie, and the penultimate Marple novel, professedly set in a present-day 1960s London with its Post Office Tower and Carnaby Street boutiques, involves the sleuth returning to a hotel she last visited as a fourteen-year-old girl nearly sixty years earlier. All of which if ‘true’ – and the truth is pretty meaningless when considering a fictional character – would ‘technically’ have made Marple thirty- eight or thirty-nine back in 1930 and therefore roughly the same age as Christie.
More importantly for our purposes, here Marple is also said to have ‘remarkable eyesight for her age’. Only three years earlier, however, in The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side, the rather more sickly spinster’s eyes – and her glasses – were supposedly giving her trouble. Christie, taking a bit of a swipe at the optical profession, stated that ‘Even her new spectacles didn’t seem to do any good. And that, she reflected, was because obviously there came a time when oculists, in spite of their luxurious waiting- rooms, the up-to-date instruments, the bright lights they flashed into your eyes, and the very high fees they charged, couldn’t do anything much more for you. Miss Marple reflected with some nostalgia on how good her eyesight had been a few (well, not perhaps a few) years ago.’
Perhaps those pricey oculists came to her rescue after all, and they were responsible for the massive improvement in her eyesight that followed. Or the intervening book spent solving a murder under the sun in a high-end Trinidadian hotel worked its magic in more ways than one. Who knows? The mystery of Marple and her spectacles remains a case awaiting a suitably talented amateur to solve.
The Frame Game: Five Spectacular Crime Novels
The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco Set in a Benedictine Abbey somewhere in Northern Italy in 1327, Eco’s novel combines a page-turning mystery – one whose plot revolves around the agreeably grisly murders of half a dozen monks, the coming of the antichrist and a ‘lost’ volume of Aristotle’s Poetics – with a disposition on the limits of secular and spiritual power, reason and faith and tradition and progress in the late middle ages. If the unholy begetter of The Da Vinci Code, the book’s main character is a monk-detective, the Franciscan friar William of Baskerville, whose ageing eyesight and sleuthing skills are enhanced by a pair of early rivet-nose spectacles. It also relates some of the mythic stories that surround the possible inventor of glasses in this era. An artisan whose much contested identity is still unknown.
The Adventure of the Gold Pince-Nez by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Eco’s Baskerville was named in honour of Sherlock’s Holmes most famous case. But before Conan Doyle achieved his literary fame, he’d qualified as a physician in Edinburgh and practised in Southsea and went on to study ophthalmology in Vienna. On returning to Britain in 1891, he took premises in Upper Wimpole Street, London, and tried, without success, to establish himself as an eye-doctor. The failure of this venture was soon softened by the sudden demand for the Holmes stories he’d begun to pen in his spare-time, and Doyle abandoned medicine to for good to concentrate on writing. And in this ‘Adventure’ involving pesky one-time Russian anarchists was published in The Strand magazine in 1904, the consulting detective is hired to solve the murder of a factotum to an elderly professor. The former’s dead hands found to be still clutching onto a rather fancy pair of pince-nez style spectacles.
Gaudy Night by Dorothy L Sayers Lord Peter Wimsey, Dorothy L Sayers’ aristocratic and monocle-sporting sleuth, first appeared in her 1923 novel Whose Body? – another work of crime fiction featuring a corpse and a pair of pince-nez. The body in question here discovered in a bath and all but naked aside from these spectacles. Some years later, fellow mystery author Ngaio Marsh would note Sayers own preference for this by then rather antiquated style of eyewear, describing the writer as ‘robust, round and rubicund’, a cross ‘between a guardsman and a female don with a jolly face (garnished with pince-nez), short grey curls, & a gruff voice’. With its action largely confined to Shrewsbury, a women-only Oxford college modelled after Somerville, Gaudy Night is itself almost entirely peopled by female dons. Intended by Sayers as a final outing for Wimsey, this 1935 novel belongs more fully to Harriet Vane, her whodunnit-writing fictional alter ego. Wimsey spends most of the novel conspicuously out of view, detained abroad on top-secret government business. If also lacking a body in the (university) library, the novel, nevertheless boasts a full complement of bespectacled spinster academics. All of whom come under suspicion as Vane seeks to unmask the person responsible for a malicious campaign that escalates from poison pen letters to physical assaults in the previously studious cloisters of her alma mater.
The Cheaters by Robert Bloch P G Wodehouse is credited with being one of the very first people (if not the first) to use the American slang phrase ‘cheaters’ for a pair of eyeglasses, in print. The horror writer Robert Bloch, whose novel Psycho was famously brought to the big screen by Alfred Hitchcock, began his career writing for pulp magazines as a teenager. He’d been encouraged to submit stories to such periodicals by his hero H P Lovecraft, who served as a mentor to Bloch and the pair kept up a lengthy correspondence, though never met in person. And ‘The Cheaters’, if first appearing in Weird Tales in 1947 a decade after Lovecraft’s own passing, bears the imprint of the master’s influence. Though shades of James M Cain’s classic noir The Postman Always Rings Twice are also discernible too. If a peculiar pair of spectacles are at the centre of this brilliantly, mordantly creepy story, the title also alludes to the ignoble actions of many of its characters, who are variously would-be murderers, swindlers, shoplifters, double-crossers, chisellers and adulterers. Told in a sequence of first-person narratives, it reveals the unhappy fates of a series of individuals who come into possession of the aforementioned ‘cheaters’. This particular pair of old silver glasses have the word ‘Veritas’ engraved on the bridge across the nose and are initially discovered during a house-clearance of a suitably, spooky, ruined mansion once owned by Dirk Van Prinn a dabbler in sorcery.
The Little Sister by Raymond Chandler Much like his creator, Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe is chiefly a man interested in the sort of glasses you pour Old Forester bourbon into – and in book after book the gumshoe is a fastidious, almost obsessive-compulsive, washer-upper and wiper-cleaner of spent nightcap highballs and morning chaser tumblers. But in The Little Sister Marlowe displays a rather canny awareness of contemporary female optical fashions when engaged to find a missing brother by the novel’s namesake, Orfamany Quest, a ‘prissy-looking’ young lady from Kansas with ‘that Librarian’s look’ in ‘rimless cheaters’. With a plot, even by Chandler’s standard, as magnificently tangled as linguine, and that concerns blackmail, extortion, filial betrayal and all manner of other dark deeds under the bright sun and neon lights of Southern California, including a run of slayings by ice pick. One of those murdered, and adding further spectacle-interest, supposedly a ‘retired optometrist’ from El Centro.
See:
https://www.hachette.co.uk/titles/travis-elborough-2/through-the-looking-glasses/9781408712849/
