‘Morning, Bantry,’ said the chief constable. ‘Thought I’d better come along myself. This seems an extraordinary business.’
‘It’s – it’s –’ Colonel Bantry struggled to express himself– ‘it’s incredible – fantastic!’
(Chapter 1, section 5)

Jefferson nodded. He said, ‘It certainly seems fantastic.’
(Chapter 8, section 3)

‘It’s an extraordinary business,’ Sir Henry commented when Jefferson had finished.
(Chapter 11, section 1)

Superintendent Harper said, ‘Have you any idea at all, sir, who can have done this?’
‘Good God, I wish I had!’ The veins stood out on Jefferson’s forehead. ‘It’s incredible, unimaginable!’
(Have we got the message yet, that all the characters find the whole thing wildly improbable)

‘You know,’ said Mrs Bantry, ‘I can’t help feeling glad they’ve taken the body away. It’s not nice to have a body in one’s house.’
(The genteel approach to murder in a village of posh ladies and gossipy spinsters)

Jefferson said, frowning, ‘I can’t help feeling it must be the work of some maniac – the brutality of the method, breaking into a country house, the whole thing so unconnected and senseless.’
(The same baseless claim made by someone in more or less all of the novels, that the murderer must be a fiend, a maniac, a lunatic – which helps to ramp up the tension and give the text the Gothic sense that there’s a madman on the loose)

Funny old tabby, thought Dinah… Eccentric old bean… Nosey old cat…
(Young floozy Dinah Lee’s opinion of old Miss Marple)

Plot summary

The body in the library trope

Right from the start it’s a sort of joke that a murdered body is found in the library of a posh country house because it’s such a cliché of the genre. Thus the improbably amused tone of the lady of the manor where the body is discovered, Dolly Bantry, in a phone call to Miss Marple:

‘But you’re very good at murders. She’s been murdered you see; strangled. 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. That’s why I want you to come and help me find out who did it and unravel the mystery and all that. It really is rather thrilling, isn’t it?’

It was 1942 and Christie was well aware that this sort of thing had happened so many times in previous detective stories that ‘the body in the library’ was virtually a sub-genre in its own right. Particularly if it’s the body of a nubile young woman, as it is here. And a blonde, to boot!

Miss Marple demanded breathlessly, ‘But whose body is it?’
‘It’s a blonde.’
‘A what?’
‘A blonde. A beautiful blonde – like in the books…’

Indeed, according to the Wikipedia article on the book:

In her ‘Author’s Foreword’, Christie describes ‘the body in the library’ as a cliché of detective fiction. She states that when writing her own variation on this theme, she decided that the library should be a completely conventional one while the body would be a highly improbable and sensational one.

So one aspect of the entertainment, then, derives from finding out how Christie will treat such a familiar subject or cliché – or classic trope – of the detective genre.

Miss Marple

And the answer is given almost straight away when we realise this is going to be a Miss Marple story. Miss Jane Marple, shrewd spinster inhabitant of the little village of St Mary Mead, first appeared in a short story in 1927, ‘The Tuesday Night Club’, which was then made the basis of a collection of stories, ‘The Thirteen Problems’, published in 1932. Her first appearance in a full-length novel was in The Murder at the Vicarage in 1930 so ‘The Body in the Library’ is only the second novel devoted to her, a full 12 years after the first.

The library in question is part of the country house, Gossington Hall, a mile and a half from St Mary Mead, the village where Miss M lives, and soon after the body is discovered (by the servants), the Hall owner’s wife, Mrs Bantry, is on the phone to her old friend Jane Marple, to tell her the shocking news.

‘We’ve just found a body in the library.’
For a moment Miss Marple thought her friend had gone mad.
‘You’ve found a what?’
‘I know. One doesn’t believe it, does one? I mean I thought they only happened in books.’

The police

In fact, despite Mrs Bantry’s invitation to her old friend to help out, it takes about half the text before Miss Marple becomes really involved in the case. First of all the police are called in, in the form of: Colonel Melchett, the chief constable of (the fictional country of) Radfordshire and Inspector Slack. There’s a slight complication in that the body was found in the library at Gossington Hall, which is in the country of Radfordshire, while the Majestic Hotel where they discover the murdered girl worked, is across the country border in the county of Glenshire, and so the investigation has to be a joint undertaking by Melchett and Slack from the Radfordshire force, and Superintendent Harper from the Glenshire force. So there’s a certain amount of jostling and dislike between these three men who each have different temperaments and approaches (Melchett is bluff to the point of rudeness; Slack is hyperactive; Harper is slow and imperturbable).

Anyway, over the leisurely course of the first half of the narrative, they discover that:

Ruby Keene

The dead woman is a dancer and hostess named Ruby Keene who worked at the Majestic Hotel in the (fictional) seaside resort of Danemouth. There’s a backstory: her cousin, Josephine ‘Josie’ Turner, had for some time been working at the hotel, entertaining guests by dancing and/or organising bridge games with them, alongside her stylish dancing partner, Raymond Starr. Until, that is, a month or so before the narrative starts, Josie twisted her ankle climbing over slippery rocks on the shore. She was no longer able to undertake her dancing duties which angered the hotel manager, Mr Prestcott, until Josie suggested inviting her pretty young cousin to come and replace her. And so Ruby arrived. Very young, only 18, not particularly attractive (in Mark Gaskell’s opinion, ‘A thin ferrety little face, not much chin, teeth running down her throat, nondescript sort of nose…’) but knew how to use make-up and, above all, was young and vivacious. The guests liked her.

Conway Jefferson

But the massively central fact of the story rotates around a character Conway Jefferson. This is complicated. Jefferson is an older man (in his 60s?). He was happily married with two grown-up children, Frank and Rosamund, who were themselves married. But then he and his family were involved in a disastrous plane crash. His wife and two children were killed, and he himself was so seriously injured that both his legs had to be amputated, confining him to a wheelchair. But he is a forceful, determined personality and, following the crash, he took to speculating on the stock market and made a fortune. Now he regularly visits the Majestic Hotel where he takes the best suite of rooms and treats himself to the best food.

I mentioned that his children were married. At the hotel he is routinely accompanied by his son’s wife/widow, Adelaide ‘Addie’ Jefferson; and his daughter’s husband, Mark Gaskill. Addie already had a son by her first marriage, young Peter Carmody who, like lots of boys in Christie, is a keen reader of detective stories!

Conway was going to adopt Ruby

Now what the police establish, in the course of interviews conducted by Melchett, Harper and Slack, is that this wheelchair-bound older man had taken a very strong liking indeed to the murdered woman, Ruby. Jefferson himself explains that, confined to a wheelchair as he is, he is attracted to youth and vitality. And young Ruby was fresh and young and unselfconsciously friendly. And so he had taken legal steps to adopt her as his daughter! He had made a new will, just a matter of ten days or so earlier and in this will he left no less than £50,000 to be held in trust for Ruby Keene until she was twenty-five, when she would come into the principal.

Motive?

Obviously the cops’ ears prick up. Now we have a motive for the murder, one of the oldest motives in the book, money. Was Ruby murdered by someone who stood to lose out as and when Jefferson died and most of his money went to young Ruby? The problem with this theory is, as Jefferson himself explains, that he had already settled significant sums on his two children’s spouses, Addie and Mark, so it wasn’t like they were champing at the bit for his inheritance. His generosity had already made them both independently wealthy.

Conway called the cops

Anyway, this explains why, when Ruby failed to show up for her second shift of dancing and hostessing, on the night in question – something which became obvious to Josie and the dancing partner Raymond – it wasn’t they or the hotel manager who called the police, but Jefferson who, when he learned about her absence, became extremely concerned, and called the cops.

Josie conspiring

There’s another angle, which is that it was Josie who pushed her cousin towards Jefferson. From interviewing Josie and the others, the police begin to understand that Ruby being quite so kind to Jefferson was at least a conscious plan by Josie to butter the old man up.

George Bartlett

As to the night of the murder, the police discover another very strong suspect. This is a silly, flustered young man named George Bartlett:

A thin, lanky youth with a prominent Adam apple and an immense difficulty in saying what he meant. He was in such a state of dither that it was hard to get a calm statement from him.

Bartlett hangs round the hotel trying to chat up young women and consistently failing. On the night of the murder he danced with Ruby till about 11 and then vaguely describes going outside for a walk around, in the evening air, only appearing back in the ballroom about midnight when the missing girl failed to turn up for her next dancing session and her colleagues started to worry. In other words he was a) the last person seen with the murder victim and b) had no alibi for the hour or so during which she was murdered. Also c) he owns a car, and so could have offered to take Ruby for a spin, during which he, for whatever reason, strangled her, drive to Gossington Park and dumped her body.

He had the opportunity but the police are left asking themselves what possible motive he could have? Why drive all the way to Gossington Hall, break in, and smuggle into the library a dead body? If he had some sudden violent turn and strangled the poor girl in his car, why not just dump her body in some remote site and drive back to the hotel quickly.

Those are the main facts the trio of policemen have established by halfway through the book which is where Miss Marple – who’d popped up here and there, mainly as a good friend of the owner of Gossington Hall, Dolly Bantry – begins to become more involved.

Sir Henry Clithering recommends Miss Marple

She is consciously brought into the case in the following way. Jefferson calls up an old friend of his, Sir Henry Clithering, ex-Commissioner of Scotland Yard, to conduct a private investigation, alongside the official police one. And it just so happens that this Sir Henry had featured in the short story collection ‘The Thirteen Problems’, which I mentioned above, wherein he had seen Miss Marple solve an impressive number of crimes using her particular method. So Clithering recommends her to Jefferson:

Sir Henry said slowly, ‘You probably won’t believe me, but you’ve got an expert at solving mysteries sitting downstairs in the lounge at this minute. Someone who’s better than I am at it,
and who, in all probability, may have some local dope.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘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.’
Jefferson stared at him with thick puckered brows. He said heavily, ‘You’re joking.’

But Clithering isn’t joking and so Jefferson takes Miss Marple on.

Miss Marple’s method

1. Universal scepticism

Miss Marple’s ‘method’ consists of two parts. Part one is universal scepticism:

‘The truth is, you see, that most people, and I don’t exclude policemen, are far too trusting for this wicked world. They believe what is told them. I never do. I’m afraid I always like to prove a thing for myself.’

She likes to think things through based on the actual facts of what she sees for herself, maintaining a healthy scepticism about everything that she hears. Or, as she puts it:

‘As I’ve told you, I’ve got a very suspicious mind.’

2. Village parallels

But the core of her ‘method’, improbable though it sounds, consists in finding analogies from life in the small village where she lives, St Mary Mead, and applying them to the characters in crimes.

Miss Marple had attained fame by her ability to link up trivial village happenings with graver problems in such a way as to throw light upon the latter.

Or, as Clithering (not totally satisfactorily) explains it:

‘Woman’s intuition, I suppose,’ Jefferson said sceptically.
‘No, she doesn’t call it that. Specialized knowledge is her claim.’
‘And what does that mean?’
‘Well, you know, Jefferson, we use it in police work. We get a burglary and we usually know pretty well who did it of the regular crowd, that is. We know the sort of burglar who acts in a particular sort of way. Miss Marple has an interesting, though occasionally trivial, series of parallels from village life.’

So her ‘method’ runs along the lines of her saying to Sir Henry, or Inspector Slack, or Dolly, or whoever she’s talking to, things like, ‘It reminds me of the young Billy, Mrs Mop’s son, do you remember, when he ran off with the baker’s daughter’ and so draws a parallel between a village incident and the case in hand etc. She overflows with homely gossip about her sweet little village which, on closer inspection, turn out to bear an uncanny relevance to the crime under investigation…

As Clithering phrases it in the conversation where he tells her Jefferson wants to hire here:

Miss Marple said composedly, ‘Dolly thought that a change of scene would be a good thing and she didn’t want to come alone.’
She met his eye and her own gently twinkled. ‘But of course your way of describing it is quite true. It’s rather embarrassing for me, because, of course, I am no use at all.’
‘No ideas? No village parallels?’

Village parallels That’s Miss Marple’s method in a phrase, and Christie plays it up. Later, when Miss M first meets Huge McLean, Sir Henry leans over and asks her: ‘Village parallel, please.’

Some of Miss Marple’s village parallels

For example:

‘Take the young maidservant at Mr Harbottle’s, for instance. A very ordinary girl, but quiet, with nice manners. His sister was called away to nurse a dying relative, and when she got back she found the girl completely above herself…’

Or:

‘And there was Mr Badger, who had the chemist’s shop. Made a lot of fuss over the young lady who worked in his cosmetics section. Told his wife they must look on her as a daughter and have her to live in the house. Mrs Badger didn’t see it that way at all…’

It’s:

‘A little,’ added Miss Marple, ‘like Jessie Golden, the baker’s daughter.’
‘What happened to her?’ asked Sir Henry.
‘She trained as a nursery governess and married the son of the house, who was home on leave from India. Made him a very good wife, I believe…’

Or:

‘Like Major Bury. He hung round an Anglo-Indian widow for quite ten years. A joke among her friends! In the end she gave in, but, unfortunately, ten days before they were to have been married she ran away with the chauffeur…’

Or:

‘You remember when I was so against letting Mrs Partridge collect for the Red Cross and I couldn’t say why…’

And many more anecdotes from village life. Because, after all:

‘One does see so much evil in a village,’ murmured Miss Marple in an explanatory voice.

And this, this is her explanation for the whole story, for why a dead blonde turns up in Colonel Bantry’s library, as she explains to a bewildered Basil Blake and Dinah Lee:

‘Yes, yes,’ said Miss Marple. ‘Little Tommy Bond had very much the same idea. Rather a sensitive boy, with an inferiority complex, he said teacher was always picking on him. He put a frog in the clock and it jumped out at her. You were just the same,’ went on Miss Marple, ‘only, of course, bodies are more serious matters than frogs.’

The second murdered girl

Back to the narrative, once Miss Marple is on board there is one further major plot development, which is that an abandoned car is set alight up on Danemouth Downs and is discovered to contain the charred remains of another girl, Pamela Reeves, who was reported missing a few days earlier. So are the abductions and murders of these two girls connected and, if so, how? And why?

Furthermore, about two-thirds way through, the police discover that both the bereaved spouses – Adelaide and Mark – are not as financially secure as we thought: Conway gifted them their large amounts some years ago and 1) Adelaide’s husband made a string of bad investments and lost most of the money, while 2) Mark Gaskell is an actual gambler (‘Risk everything – that’s my motto’) and has gambled away the entire sum Conway gave him, and got into debt. So both of them did have a strong motive to eliminate Ruby before Conway changed his will in her favour.

And also, several characters and the cops speculate what Conway himself might have done if he’d discovered that Ruby was seeing another man. Although the crippled Conway was in no way having an affair with her, he did, on the other hand, regard her as pure and having become, in some way, his. If he discovered that she was slipping off to see a fancy man might he, in a furious rage, have strangled her with his own hands? Christie talks up this possibility by having his physician tell the cops that Conway has more than usual strength in his upper body.

So as the book enters its last quarter there are more suspects than ever, each with believable motives and gains. Still no clue whatsoever why the murdered woman was dumped in the library at Gossington Hall, though. Or the connection with the other missing girl, Pamela Reeves.

As usual at this point I’ll stop my summary to avoid spoilers. And also because the last part, and especially the solution, of Christie novels tend to be murderously complicated and convoluted…

Cast

• Colonel Arthur Bantry – owner of Gossington Hall, principal magistrate of the district
• Mrs ‘Dolly’ Bantry – his wife
• Lorrimer – the butler
• Police Constable Palk – who Colonel Bantry calls when they find the body
• Mrs Palk
• Inspector Slack – ‘An energetic man who belied his name and who accompanied his bustling manner with a good deal of disregard for the feelings of anyone he did not consider important’
• Colonel Melchett – the chief constable of Radfordshire – ‘an irascible-looking man with a habit of
  tugging at his short red moustache’
• Superintendent Harper – from the Glenshire police
• Doctor Haydock – the police surgeon
• Basil Blake – Young fellow connected with the film industry – ‘Basil Blake was not a film star, not even a film actor. He was a very junior person, rejoicing in the position of about fifteenth in the list of those responsible for set decorations at Lenville Studios, headquarters of British New Era Films’ – lives in a ghastly modern house where he has loud parties for sybarites down from London, featuring many shameless, scantily clad young women – so he is an early suspect in the murder of just such an over-made up, scantily clad young woman
• Dinah Lee – young woman Basil argues with in front of the police when they go to interview him
• Conway Jefferson – rich man, his wife and 2 children died in an airplane crash and he had both legs amputated; has suite at the hotel where Josie worked – ‘He had a fine head, the red of the hair slightly grizzled. The face was rugged and powerful, deeply sun-tanned, and the eyes were a startling blue. There was no sign of illness or feebleness about him. The deep lines on his face were the lines of suffering, not the lines of weakness. Here was a man who would never rail against fate, but accept it and pass on to victory’
• Edwards – his valet
• Adelaide Jefferson – widow of Jefferson’s – ‘She had a singularly charming and sympathetic voice, and her eyes, clear hazel eyes, were beautiful. She was quietly but not unbecomingly dressed and was, he judged, about thirty-five years of age’ – she ‘had the power of creating a restful atmosphere. She was a woman who never seemed to say anything remarkable, but who succeeded in stimulating other people to talk and in setting them at their ease’
• Mark Gaskell – Rosamund Jefferson’s husband – Melchett ‘was sizing up Mark Gaskell as he spoke. He didn’t much care for the fellow. A bold, unscrupulous, hawk-like face. One of those men who usually get their own way and whom women frequently admire’
• Ruby Keene – ‘Ruby Keene, eighteen, occupation, professional dancer, five feet four inches, slender, platinum-blond hair, blue eyes, retroussé nose’
• Josephine Turner, ‘Josie’ – Ruby’s cousin, a professional dancer, who asked Ruby to come to the hotel and take her place as the show dancer with Raymond, while her ankle heals after an accident
• Raymond Starr – the tennis and dancing pro, ‘a fine-looking specimen, tall, lithe and good-looking, with very white teeth in a deeply-bronzed face’, ‘A tall dark young man in white flannels’
• Mr Prestcott – manager of the Majestic Hotel in Danemouth
• George Bartlett – ‘a thin, lanky youth with a prominent Adam apple and an immense difficulty in saying what he meant. He was in such a state of dither that it was hard to get a calm statement from him’
• Sir Henry Clithering – ex-Commissioner of Scotland Yard, who is friends with Jane Marple – ‘Sir Henry, during his term as commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, had been renowned for his quick grip on essentials’ – in other words, another of Christie’s bluff, intelligent, effective coppers cf Inspector Battle
• Huge McLean – long-term boyfriend of the widowed Addie – ‘a tall, middle-aged man with a thin brown face’
• Albert Briggs – labourer who discovered the burning car with the corpse in it
• Major Reeves – father of the murdered schoolgirl Pamela Reeves, ‘a stiff man with a grey moustache’
• Mrs Reeves – Pamela’s mother
• Florence Small – Girl Guide and friend of Pamela Reeves who admits to Miss Marple that Pamela lied to her friends when she said she was popping into Danemouth to go to Woolworth, but was in reality going to meet a young man from the Lemworth film studios who had promised her a screen test for the movies
• Griselda – wife of the vicar at St Mary Mead, proud mother of baby David who’s just learning to crawl

Locations

• St Mary Mead, Radfordshire
• Gossington Hall, Radfordshire
• The Majestic Hotel, Danemouth, Glenshire

Comedy

As I’m always saying, despite her best efforts to be serious (and her most successfully ghoulish books are probably ‘The ABC Murders’ and ‘Appointment with Death’, which both deal with psychologically disturbed characters), Christie is an essentially comic writer. Hercule Poirot is a comic character and so is Miss Marple.

A permanently comic attribute of the Marple stories is the way the community of gossipy old ladies in St Mary Mead (‘the ruling class of censorious spinsters’) are not only horrified by the discovery of the murdered woman, but secretly thrilled by it. It gives them all sorts of opportunities to tut and pass comment, not least on poor Colonel Bantry who is, after all the owner of the house where a lovely young woman is found murdered. You can imagine the huge amount of self-righteous gossip this triggers in a small village community! This extract conveys the very enjoyable comic tone of the thing:

St Mary Mead was having the most exciting morning it had known for a long time. Miss Wetherby, a long-nosed, acidulated spinster, was the first to spread the intoxicating information. She dropped in upon her friend and neighbour Miss Hartnell.
‘Forgive my coming so early, dear, but I thought perhaps you mightn’t have heard the news.’
‘What news?’ demanded Miss Hartnell. She had a deep bass voice and visited the poor indefatigably, however hard they tried to avoid her ministrations.
‘About the body of a young woman that was found this morning in Colonel Bantry’s library.’
‘In Colonel Bantry’s library?’
‘Yes. Isn’t it terrible?’
‘His poor wife!’ Miss Hartnell tried to disguise her deep and ardent pleasure.

And:

Mrs Price Ridley was among the last to hear the news. A rich and dictatorial widow, she lived in a large house next door to the vicarage. Her informant was her little maid, Clara.
‘A woman, you say, Clara? Found dead on Colonel Bantry’s hearth rug?’
‘Yes, mam. And they say, mam, as she hadn’t anything on at all, mam not a stitch!’
‘That will do, Clara. It is not necessary to go into details.’
‘No, mam, and they say, mam, that at first they thought it was Mr Blake’s young lady what comes down for the weekends with ‘im to Mr Booker’s new ‘ouse. But now they say it’s quite a different young lady. And the fishmonger’s young man, he says he’d never have believed it of Colonel Bantry not with him handing round the plate on Sundays and all.’

Delicious!

Bookishness

As I’ve mentioned in every Christie review, her detective novels routinely compare themselves to detective novels. The characters regularly comment that this or that situation is like something in a book (or, occasionally, movie).

I think these kinds of comments are designed to pre-empt the reader’s criticism, informing the reader that the author knows the whole thing is as preposterous as they do, but that it doesn’t matter, it’s just an entertainment. By emphasising the story’s artificiality, these kinds of comments soften the reader’s instinctive seeking for verisimilitude, lull us into MurderMysteryWorld. They’re a sort of equivalent of saying ‘Once upon a time…’, alerting you to the fact that what you’re reading is in no way serious: the opposite. It’s untroubling poolside, holiday reading. Welcome to MurderMysteryWorld!

Thus Colonel Bantry’s initial response to the news:

He said kindly, ‘You’ve been dreaming. Dolly. It’s that detective story you were reading, The Clue of the Broken Match. You know, Lord Edgbaston finds a beautiful blonde dead on the library hearth rug. Bodies are always being found in libraries in books. I’ve never known a case in real life.’

Mrs Bantry phones her friend, Jane Marple:

Miss Marple demanded breathlessly, ‘But whose body is it?’
‘It’s a blonde.’
‘A what?’
‘A blonde. A beautiful blonde – like in the books…’

Mark Gaskell’s response:

Mark Gaskell looked at Miss Marple in a somewhat puzzled fashion. He said doubtfully, ‘Do you… er… write detective stories?’
The most unlikely people, he knew, wrote detective stories. And Miss Marple, in her old-fashioned spinster’s clothes, looked a singularly unlikely person.

And then Superintendent Harper encounters Conway Jefferson’s grandson who is everso excited by news of the murder:

‘Do you like detective stories? I do. I read them all and I’ve got autographs from Dorothy Sayers and Agatha Christie and Dickson Carr and H.C. Bailey. Will the murder be in the papers?’
‘It’ll be in the papers all right,’ said Superintendent Harper grimly.

And not forgetting the obligatory nod to Sherlock Holmes which occurs in pretty much all her novels.

Sir Henry Clithering said, ‘Speaking as Watson, I want to know your methods. Miss Marple.’

The purpose of generalisations

As I’ve explained at more than enough length in other reviews, Christie’s novels abound in sweeping generalisations but these aren’t really to be taken at face value. They are more indicators of the characters who express them. In a sense, you could extract from the novels a hierarchy of generalisations, from the most obviously crass and superficial at the bottom, such as Josie’s angry outburst after she’s identified the body of her cousin:

‘What swine men are, aren’t they?’

Up to the supposedly authoritative ones of figures like Poirot and Marple. But even here they are, how shall I put it, non-factual. Not based on statistically significant surveys of the data. And so really just rhetorical in intention. Here are some of Miss Marple’s more sweeping generalisations:

‘Gentlemen are usually rather selfish.’

‘Gentlemen so easily feel neglected.’

‘Gentlemen,’ she said with her old maid’s way of referring to the opposite sex as though it were a species of wild animal, ‘are frequently not so level-headed as they seem.’

‘I should think they were both restless under old Mr Jefferson’s yoke of perpetual remembrance. Only,’ added Miss Marple cynically, ‘it’s easier for gentlemen, of course.’

But then the male characters are, of course, just as quick with sweeping generalisations about the opposite sex:

Superintendent Harper said sapiently. ‘Easier for him to look on her as a daughter than to look on Mr Gaskell as a son. It works both ways. Women accept a son-in-law as one of the family easily enough, but there aren’t many times when a woman looks on her son’s wife as a daughter.’

‘Women,’ said Sir Henry, ‘treat their devoted admirers very badly.’ Miss Marple smiled, but made no answer.

‘Women,’ said Sir Henry, ‘are eternally interested in marriages.’
‘Especially,’ said the superintendent, ‘elderly single women!’

And at various points all manner of characters are prone to drop general rules about life:

Dr Metcalfe: ‘The human frame is tougher than one can imagine possible.’

Harper: ‘Girls usually like to shop with someone.’

The English, Sir Henry decided, had a distrust for any man who danced too well.

There is no truth in any of these axioms. They are rhetorical devices designed to bring out the personality (and complacency) of the characters, and to give the novel a spurious sense of depth.

Or spurious wisdom

I suppose there’s another interpretation which is that literature, books etc are associated with wisdom. Novels in particular tend to overflow with authors and characters summing up this or that aspect of human nature. So Christie’s pithy axioms can also be seen as a nod to that tradition. They’re just something you have in novels – characters dropping generalisations and pearls of insight.

In other words, the generalisations give the impression that they are part of serious books conveying some kind of authorial wisdom. But the axioms themselves are for the most part trite and empty just in proportion as the Christie novels fall far short of any definition of ‘literature’.

Literature is, on the whole, in some sense demanding, demands a higher level of linguistic or cultural or psychological awareness. Whereas Christie’s novels are designed to be the exact opposite, easy to consume as a bag of sweets. As demanding as a crossword or Sudoku puzzle, maybe, but designed to be easily consumed and forgotten. And so with the rather grand-sounding but ultimately empty and meaningless generalisations which the characters come out with, and which are purely designed to bring out their characters, and grease the wheels of the plot.

1940s slang

Apparently these two phrases were still new in the late 1930s / ’40s:

Boyfriend

‘She’d got a date with someone, “a boy friend”, as the saying goes.’

Crush

‘Well, the idea is, isn’t it, that Ruby Keene changed her dress and went off to meet someone on whom she presumably had what my young nephews call a “crush”?’

Whereas ‘bottled’ appears to be common currency:

‘Bottled, was he?’ said Colonel Bantry, with an Englishman’s sympathy for alcoholic excess. ‘Oh, well, can’t judge a fellow by what he does when he’s drunk.’

Credit

‘The Body in the Library’ by Agatha Christie was published by the Collins Crime Club in May 1942.

Related links

• The Body in the Library online (PDF)
• Agatha Christie website

Related reviews

• Agatha Christie reviews
• 1940s reviews