The Body In The Library – Agatha Christie, 1942 ★★★

Murder Most Cozy

When you read a book that helped spawn an entire subgenre, you tend to look for signs of aborning fecundity.

Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple is to cozy mysteries what James Bond is to spy fiction: The first name that springs to mind when discussing the genre. Think murder in a quiet town, a dash of elegant humor and no big emotions, and you think Marple.

At least I do. Either her or Jessica Fletcher, whom Angela Lansbury played in the long-running TV series “Murder She Wrote,” and who bore a striking resemblance in both attitude and manner to Christie’s sleuthing spinster.

A body turns up in the library of a retired colonel and his wife, the Bantrys. Eventually it comes out she was a young woman who danced professionally at a hotel in a nearby town. Despite the police being on the case, Miss Marple shows up to help clear the colonel’s name.

Sir Henry Clithering of Scotland Yard gives her a big build-up:

“Downstairs in the lounge, by the third pillar from the left, there sits an old lady with a sweet, placid spinsterish face, and a mind that has plumbed the depths of human iniquity and taken it as all in the day’s work. Her name’s Miss Marple. She comes from the village of St. Mary Mead, which is a mile and a half from Gossington, she’s a friend of the Bantrys – and where crime is concerned she’s the goods, Conway.”

That she is. In stereotypical mystery-cozy fashion, she understands at once the situation and quickly deduces the murderer’s identity, in a way no one else (including the reader) can reasonably fathom.

Agatha Christie. She produced 12 Miss Marple novels and 20 short stories between 1927 and 1976, a robust haul that pales in comparison to that of her other detective, Hercule Poirot (33 novels, 54 short stories). Image from https://www.metro.news/agatha-christie-worlds-first-historical-whodunnit-was-inspired-by-4000-year-old-letters/1067932/. 

The Body In The Library does not defy conventions. Rather, it defines them. In an entertaining Foreword, Christie explains how the driving force behind this novel was to start with a long-standing cliché, a body in a library, then build a mystery around it:

I laid down for myself certain conditions. The library in question must be a highly orthodox and conventional library. The body, on the other hand, must be a wildly improbable and highly sensational body.

Certain conditions are in play. Miss Marple never journeys far from her home village to pursue her investigation. The settings are quaint, there are no flashes of temper or social awkwardness, and every suspect cooperates with patience and candor as this tweedy stranger asks all these questions. Even the police follow Sir Henry’s lead by respecting Miss Marple’s authority.

An overarching atmosphere of good humor contributes to the novel’s light tone. Not so broad as you got in the 1960s Miss Marple films featuring the awesome Margaret Rutherford, where the old girl struggled with riding boots and rhumbas, but definitely in the ballpark.

Take Mrs. Bantry, the woman of the house with the library. We see her at the beginning happily dreaming about winning first prize at a surreal flower show. Awoken with news of a body downstairs, she prods her sleepy hubby to go downstairs for a look.

Later she reaches out to her friend Miss Marple for help solving the crime. A shadow of suspicion may be descending on her husband; Mrs. Bantry herself is pleased as punch. “What I feel is that if one has got to have a murder actually happening in one’s house, one might as well enjoy it, if you know what I mean,” she says.

Gwen Watford as Mrs. Bantry and Joan Hickson as Miss Marple in a 1984 BBC-TV adaptation of The Body In The Library. Image from https://www.pinterest.com/pin/551268810614372996/?lp=true.

The hotel manager, when asked if the victim had any suspicious suitors, takes first honors for drollery: “Nothing in the strangling line, I’d say.”

Not everything about The Body In The Library is so cozy. Take the matter of the corpse: thin, done up in white satin and bleached curls, the powder on her face “standing out grotesquely on its blue swollen surface…the scarlet of the lips looking like a gash.” Later, an even more horrific second murder is uncovered and coolly described.

There is a subtle but persistent social subtext to the novel that pushes against the pleasant banter. Murder victim Ruby Keene is revealed to be a striver of humble origins, seeking to strike it rich by befriending rich, aged Conway Jefferson.

Conway was quite taken by her; those who stood to inherit his vast estate much less so.

“A decided little gold-digger,” one of the suspects opines. Others say they can’t blame her for trying to get rich, but glad she is out of the way.

Even Miss Marple’s deductions revolve at times around the victim’s presumed social class. What kind of woman would run into a wet autumn night in her best outfit? A lower-class one, she suggests.

A 1927 illustration of Miss Marple, drawn by Gilbert Wilkerson for The Royal Magazine, offered the public its first-ever glimpse of the crime-solving spinster with knitting in hand. It ran alongside the debut Marple story, "The Tuesday Night Club." It was followed in 1930 by the first Marple novel, The Murder At The Vicarage. Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miss_Marple.

Social conventions seem to dictate everything in this novel; you can ponder at length whether Christie was criticizing the times or merely reflecting them. Again and again, it seems whom you know matters more than who you are. Even Sir Henry of Scotland Yard, the most level-headed of the secondary characters, registers “a slight feeling of prejudice” against a person of interest who works as a tennis instructor and dancer at the hotel:

If so, it wasn’t the tennis – it was the dancing. The English, Sir Henry decided, had a distrust for any man who danced too well! This fellow moved with too much grace!

One fellow is looked upon as a likely suspect by all, mainly it seems because he’s both a village outsider and in show business. “He’s taken that cottage on the Lansham Road – you know – ghastly modern bit of building,” grumbles Colonel Bantry. “He has parties there, shrieking, noisy crowds, and he has girls down for the weekend.”

There is some darkness too about Miss Marple herself. This was only Christie’s second novel to feature Miss Marple, published over a decade after the first, and Christie doesn’t strain at making her too likable. The secret to solving mysteries, she explains, is believing the worst in everyone. “The truth is, you see, that most people – and I don’t exclude policemen – are far too trusting for this wicked world,” she says. “They believe what is told them. I never do.”

Other ripples jostle the cozy formula, though never upend it. Miss Marple isn’t even around for long periods, leaving the actual detectives to do detective work. Three official coppers work on this case in addition to Sir Henry, getting nowhere. This pushes too hard the core conceit of the cozy mystery, that an amateur with knitting needles can run circles around trained forensic investigators.

But in tune with the cozy aesthetic, there are no turfy bouts of unpleasantness regarding this intruder into a police investigation. If it were Christie’s other signature sleuth, Hercule Poirot, on the case, you’d get a bit of tension from the people with the badges. Here, Miss Marple gets only an occasional cocked eyebrow but deference in the main. 

The cover of the U. S. first edition, published in 1942. While published well into World War II, no mention of the war appears in the story. Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Body_in_the_Library.

So The Body In The Library makes for amiable company. How is it as a mystery?

It’s not as crafty as other Christie mysteries I’ve read. Not every mystery of hers is going to be The Murder Of Roger Ackroyd or Ten Little Indians for cunning or suspense, but this is definitely more canter in the park than night of soul-baring terror or taut gallop to the post.

She does surprise; I for one didn’t cotton on to whodunit until the big reveal. The book is constructed in her typical way where each chapter builds to a big revelation, then immediately launches into a new paradox or puzzle to be sorted. Even when these turn into blind alleys or red herrings, Christie carefully circles back to explain them in the larger context of the story. So full marks there. She knew her craft.

Does she play fair? Not really. Miss Marple’s insight here consisted of part intuition, part telepathy, and occasionally paying a visit to some public records facility to nail the the case shut which Christie doesn’t mention until the big reveal.

Instead, she distracts with amusing digs at various suspects:

“As I see it, he’s either a very clever gentleman pretending to be a silly ass, or else – well, he is a silly ass.”

“She’s got one of those shrewd, limited, practical minds that never do foresee the future and are usually astonished by it.”

“An alibi is the fishiest thing on God’s earth! No innocent person ever has an alibi!”

At one point, Miss Marple has police trot out a group of young women and deduces which one has a secret by the way she left the room. “They nearly always relax too soon,” she explains.

I mean, c’mon! How was anyone supposed to catch that! Christie never would have tried something so slapdash to account for a Poirot brainwave.

Still I opened this novel expecting a bit of relaxation from life’s cares, and that was what I got. Miss Marple makes for pleasant company. So too does Dame Agatha, who doles out more charm than clues this time out. Challenging, no, but as mystery cozies go, it checks most of the boxes while ever-so-gently toying with expectations.