Again Miss Marple remains in the background. At least in the early going, this was a big part of her character and her method. Recall her quietly knitting through the stories of The Tuesday Night Club, or the fact that she isn’t the narrator of The Murder at the Vicarage and indeed isn’t a major presence in that book at all. In The Body in the Library she doesn’t even appear very often. She’s not the sort of detective to lead a very active investigation, looking for clues, or interviewing witnesses. Sure she does a bit of that, but mostly she just notices things. Luckily, the police are willing, if not always happy, to have her along for the ride.

Marple’s process of ratiocination goes from the local to the universal, the incidental to the supremely important. We’re told she “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.” But to be honest I never see a lot of that happening. We just have to take it on faith, since any village happenings are only slightly alluded to. What seems more on tap here is a literary diversion. “Bodies are always being found in libraries in books. I’ve never known a case in real life,” says gruff Colonel Bantry, just before finding a body in his library. Christie herself introduced the book as having been written out of a desire to play a “Variation on a well-known Theme,” with the theme being the body in the library, recognized to be a cliché of the detective story. This made me wonder how many bodies had been found in libraries before this book (which was first published in 1942). I guess a lot.

Otherwise this seems much the usual puzzle for Jane to solve. The killers hatch an insanely complicated plot, which is made even more difficult to untangle because the innocent guy they attempt to frame behaves in a ridiculous manner. He’s the one who thinks it would be a neat idea to hide the body in the library of Colonel Bantry, just because he doesn’t like the Colonel very much. And I guess he was drunk. Throw in the absurd idea that only one person has to (mis)identify the dead body or else the whole scheme would instantly fall apart and you’ve got something so farfetched I don’t think it’s being fair to the reader. And then you get another of those clues that depends on a bit of specifically British knowledge, like the “banting” and “hundreds and thousands” that I pulled a blank on in “The Tuesday Night Club.” The clue here is a passing reference to Somerset House, which at the time was where the Registry of Births, Marriages and Deaths had its offices. But the Registry moved in 1970 and I don’t think that’s something anyone would be likely to get today. I didn’t understand what its mention meant even after I’d been alerted as to its significance.

Of course there are other Britishisms that I failed to grasp, like “beer and skittles,” but they weren’t as important and only gave the proceedings a bit of period charm.

And finally, since I’m on a roll here, the business with the fingernails is quite obscure.

To be honest, after having re-read the first Miss Marple stories and then the first two novels I’ve come away thinking they’re markedly inferior to Christie’s Poirot mysteries. And I’m not sure I liked them any better when I read them the first time forty or more years ago. As noted, the plots are bonkers, and not in a good way, as much as Miss Marple herself would want to object.

“An intricate plot,” said Colonel Melchett.

“Not more intricate than the steps of a dance,” said Miss Marple.

“I suppose not.”

Of course, the undoing of the intricacy is the point of the exercise, which is why the plot has to be so complex. There’s a nice moment here where it’s suggested that the “explanation of the whole case” may be criminal insanity, but this is immediately dismissed by the police superintendent as being “too easy.” “There are such cases,” he had earlier admitted, “but we’ve no knowledge of anyone of that kind operating in this neighbourhood.” “One does see so much evil in a village,” Miss Marple explains at another point. But not that kind of evil. As I’ve mentioned before, for Christie there are only three motives for crime: sex, greed, and lunacy. And she has no interest in lunacy because it can’t be explained in a clever way. We’re more used to psychopaths in our own time because they get so much media attention. Back in Miss Marple’s day they weren’t as interesting.

Marple index