A young schoolteacher named Faustina Crayle finds herself living in a kind of nightmare: she is forced out of her teaching job at a girls' school - and nobody will tell her why. All she knows is that people seem to be very frightened of her. When psychiatrist Dr. Basil Willing investigates on Faustina's behalf, he is told a story so fantastic that it might seem that the only explanation must be a supernatural one. But, as a psychiatrist, Dr. Willing is most unwilling to accept the supernatural...
Helen McCloy's marvelous 1950 mystery, Through a Glass, Darkly, invokes some ancient terrors - especially that of the doppelganger, the perfect double. Here's how Dr. Willing describes it:
“You enter a room, a street, a country road. You see a figure ahead of you, solid, three-dimensional, brightly coloured. Moving and obeying all the laws of optics. Its clothing and posture is vaguely familiar. You hurry toward the figure for a closer view. It turns its head and – you are looking at yourself. Or rather a perfect mirror-image of yourself only – there is no mirror. So, you know it is your double. And that frightens you, for tradition tells you that he who sees his own double is about to die…”
Through a Glass, Darkly is the subject of today's audio review on the Classic Mysteries podcast, and you can listen to the complete review by clicking here.
I'm reluctant to say much more about the story, because it is filled with surprises. It reads like some of John Dickson Carr's marvelous nearly-supernatural mysteries - think of The Three Coffins, for example, or The Plague Court Murders. McCloy has the ability to create a powerful atmosphere of terror, and the reader may be forgiven for concluding that only a supernatural solution will fit all the known facts. But Through a Glass, Darkly is a fair, carefully clued mystery - although I must admit there's a certain amount of ambiguity in the ending...
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