Perhaps it’s a bit strange why, during hectic days like these, I opted for a detective novel, which is full of questions and mysteries, to read in-between my activities. But then books like Christie’s give me comfort because of their certainty. In these books, the truth will be revealed, the culprits will pay, and order will be restored, despite likely at a different equilibrium.

Christie was the master of the genre. After And Then There Were None, Murder on the Orient Express, and The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, subsequent authors cannot introduce something really new to the whodunnit plots—they merely have to think of the details of who, how, why. Some can only, almost hopelessly, devise murders as gruesome as possible to capture the readers’ attention. And perhaps throw in some references to the Templars/Da Vinci/a secret order, while they’re at it.

I have forgotten how many, and which, Christie’s books I have read. I had the feeling that I’d read After the Funeral previously, but in need of some comforting entertainment, I still chose to pick this copy that my dad owns. And luckily, even if it’s true I’d read it before, I didn’t remember who did the crime. So this (second?) reading still gave me a fresh satisfaction when Poirot pointed his finger, or perhaps his moustache, to the real culprit.

Another thing that hit me home after I finished the book—a revelation so late—was the notion that explains why oftentimes we look at a photograph of ourselves, and think, “Why do I look different in this picture?” We of course compare the picture with the reflected image we see every day in the mirrors. Indeed, when we do look at our photograph, we are looking at a different version of ourselves.

Our bodies, our faces, are never really quite symmetrical. A photograph takes a picture of us with the appearance like other people would see it—not reversed, from the front. But a mirror reverse your back to front*, and then your right and left, and, really, it’s not really you that you see in the mirror. And you know from your own experience how a thing can look quite different by looking at it from a different angle, or when you reverse it on the mirror—an old trick of artists drawing faces to check whether their drawings are ‘alright’ is to hold their work in front of the mirror.

And now I know why I always look better in the mirror. Siiiiigh.

(*This is perhaps quite surprising, but you can try to read a nice book about right/left, Chris McManus’ Right Hand Left Hand.)