The Body in the Library by: Agatha Christie

 

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.