In a Glass Darkly

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  • Short Story
  • 1939

A man witnesses a murder of a young girl reflected in a bedroom mirror. Unsure whether it was real, he battles with himself about speaking out about this horrific crime. Will he be taken for a fool or save a life?

More about this story

A man has a vision in his mirror of a beautiful woman being strangled by a scarred man, only to meet the very people he saw. But does his vision mean anything? Was it a warning?

A tale of dark premonition, the story was initially published in US magazine Collier's Weekly (1934) and was preceded by a false premonition from the Daily Mail in the UK who announced that Agatha Christie would be reading the story on BBC Radio. They were in fact confusing her with Dorothy L. Sayers, which is just as well since Christie disliked public speeches.

The story was first published as a book in the 1939 US collection The Regatta Mystery and Other Stories. It wasn't published in the UK until the collection Miss Marple's Final Cases (which included two non-Marple stories) in October 1979. It was adapted for TV in 1982 as part of the series The Agatha Christie Hour and was later dramatised for BBC Radio 4 (without Agatha Christie's input!) and released in 2010.

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