Whenever you pick up an Agatha Christie novel that opens
with a foreward from the author, you know you’re in for a good time. The Body in the Library is one of her
novels whose title is at least well known enough to be a murder mystery trope, bolstered
by two television adaptations starring Joan Hickson and Geraldine McEwan in the
role of Miss Marple. Interestingly
enough, the trope of the body in the library was one that was old when Christie
was writing this book she intentionally uses the trope to deconstruct detective
fiction as a whole. The opening pages of
The Body in the Library establish the madness of a dead body being found
by Col. Bantry’s maid in his personal library when going in to draw the curtains
for the day. Christie also doesn’t play
this farcical situation entirely for farce, going for a more serious murder
mystery route as with The Murder at the Vicarage before it, The Body
in the Library is a Miss Marple story.
The characters within the story believe this must be an open and shut,
unsolvable case since it’s clear the colonel and his wife clearly couldn’t have
done it but British society says they must be shunned. They’re both characters who garner quite a
bit of sympathy although Christie does not do anything to examine the role of
class, the servants in the story are never suspects though the police are ineffective
and it’s Miss Marple who puts things together.
There’s this sense that the Bantry’s are genuinely suffering from the ‘scandal’
of a beautiful young woman turning up dead.
What’s especially nice is that Col. Bantry and his wife genuinely love
each other and don’t have some big twist about how the colonel is having an
affair with a much younger woman.
The setup of The Body in the Library is also interesting
as the victim, Ruby Keene, is a dancer and a platinum blonde, heavily drugged
before she was found strangled in the library.
It’s a setup that’s utterly ridiculous and only gets more ridiculous. Another body is found in a car that has been
burned with gasoline, the car being the most popular model of the time so while
it’s owner is identified, once again it’s someone who could not have possibly
done the murder. This is the second novel
to feature Miss Marple, although she had appeared in short stories in between,
which has helped as she feels less of a minor character here as she did in The
Murder at the Vicarage. Christie
does have this very interesting style where the reader feels like everyone else
in the novel should just shut up and let Miss Marple work through the issues
regarding the murders. The characters
are also just wonderfully portrayed, despite a rather short length only
clocking in at about 200 pages, including a child who’s a fan of detective fiction
especially Agatha Christie, an older gentleman who has left 50,000 to the murder
victim, a young man who works in film who’s incredibly sardonic and womanizing,
and the general inspectors who cannot believe a body would be found in Col.
Bantry’s library.
Overall, The Body in the Library is a cracking
murder mystery despite being quite short on the whole. It manages to straddle the line between
genuine drama and farce, deconstructing the murder mystery to take its
characters incredibly seriously in an over the top murder which works quite
well for Miss Marple. 8/10.
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