Mostly Murders

A Miss Marple Mystery. Mr. and Mrs. Bantry are a respectable and conventional upper-class couple who one morning wake to find the body of a young woman in their library. The couple both claim to have no knowledge of how this could possibly have happened. Inspector Slack is sent to investigate, but Mrs. Bantry calls in her friend Miss Jane Marple for backup.

In the foreword to this book, Agatha Christie explains that she wanted to write a “Variation on a well-known Theme.” The well-known theme is a body being found in a “highly orthodox and conventional library”, and the variation is that the body “must be a wildly improbable and highly sensational body.” The Body in the Library is that story. The dead woman had no business being in the Bantry’s library, and the solution to the mystery of how she ended up there, is indeed both improbable and sensational.

Throughout the book, Agatha Christie uses seemingly random conversations and gossip to show how people’s expectations and prejudices lead them astray as they jump to understandable but flawed conclusions based on what they think they already know. But Miss Marple, using her “very suspicious mind”, takes nothing for granted and sees through the assumptions and postulations, unravelling the complicated case of deception and murder and gathering all the clues necessary to decide for herself what actually happened.

The Body in the Library is a great example of how Agatha Christie uses her keen knowledge of how people think to let the reader mislead themself with assumptions about people and situations, while the true clues to the crime were actually there all along.

Mystery – Agatha Christie