Plot summary
The maid at Gossington Hall wakes Mrs. Bantry; "There is a body in the library!" she cries. Dolly Bantry then wakes her husband, Colonel Arthur Bantry, and tells him to go downstairs. He finds the dead body of a young woman on the hearth rug in the library. She had been painted with heavy makeup, has platinum-blonde hair, and a silver-spangled dress. The colonel then contacts the police, and Mrs. Bantry calls Miss Marple (an old friend of hers). The police investigators include Colonel Melchett and Inspector Slack.
Trying to identify this dead young woman, Melchett heads to the nearby cottage of Basil Blake, but Blake's girlfriend Dinah Lee, a platinum blonde, is very much alive and arrives at the house while Melchett is interviewing Blake. Dr. Haydock's autopsy reveals that the young woman, healthy but not fully mature, died between 10 pm and 12 midnight on the previous evening, had been drugged and then strangled, and was "virgo intacta". Miss Marple notices that the appearance of this girl is not right, from her bitten fingernails to her old dress. She shares these observations with Dolly.
Hotel guest Conway Jefferson reports Ruby Keene, an 18-year-old dancer at the Majestic Hotel in Danemouth, as missing. Josie Turner, an employee at the hotel, identifies the body at Gossington Hall as that of her cousin Ruby. Guests saw Ruby as late as 11 pm dancing with George Bartlett, but Ruby did not appear for her dance demonstration at midnight. Jefferson tells police he has revised his will to favour Ruby, until the legal adoption is completed.
Dolly and Miss Marple move to the Majestic to investigate further. Conway calls Sir Henry Clithering, a former senior police officer, to join the investigation; Sir Henry sees Miss Marple at the hotel and in turn invites her to investigate.
Conway made large financial settlements for his children at the time each married. Then his wife, son and daughter were killed in an aeroplane crash eight years earlier. The three grieving survivors, son-in-law Mark, daughter-in-law Adelaide, and Conway, make up a household. They were playing bridge that evening with Josie. Police initially rule out the son-in-law and daughter-in-law, thinking each one is financially secure. But both are short of money, as Slack’s investigation and Adelaide's conversation with Dolly reveal.
Bartlett's burned-out car is found with a charred corpse inside. From one shoe and one button, the corpse is identified as that of 16-year-old Girl Guide Pamela Reeves, reported missing by her parents the previous night.
The police ask Miss Marple to interview the other girls at a Guides event, and ask Sir Henry to question Conway's valet, Edwards. Miss Marple learns from Pamela's friend Florence that Pamela had been approached by a film producer and offered a screen test that evening, which was why she did not go directly home. Edwards reports that he saw a snapshot of Basil Blake fall out of Ruby's handbag while she was with Conway, which points to Blake. Slack had already found the hearth rug from the Blake home dumped.
Miss Marple believes that she knows who the murderer is, and seeks proof of her deduction. She visits Dinah Lee; Basil returns home, and he reveals how he found the corpse on the hearth rug around midnight when he came home rather drunk after a party. He moved the corpse to the Bantry home, not liking Bantry much. He did not kill the girl. However, the police arrest him.
Back at the hotel, Miss Marple asks the Bantrys to find a marriage record at Somerset House. She asks Sir Henry to approach Jefferson, who agrees to tell Mark and Adelaide that he will change his will the next day, leaving his money to a hostel in London. Sir Henry alerts the police, and shows the marriage record for Mark and Josie. At 3 am, an intruder, Josie Turner, enters Conway's bedroom, and is caught in the act by the police before she can harm Jefferson with a syringe filled with digitalin.
Miss Marple explains her thinking to Conway and the police. The body in the library was Pamela Reeves, made up to look more or less like Ruby, with her bitten fingernails giving away her youth. Ruby was the one burned in the car. Thus the alibis at the hotel were useless. Miss Marple did not believe the identification by Josie ("people are far too trusting for this wicked world") and sensed a plan gone awry.
She suspected that Mark and Josie were married. Besides wanting Conway dead, upon learning that Conway planned to adopt Ruby, they made the double murder plan. Mark lured Pamela to the hotel for the fictitious screen test. Josie dressed her, dyed her hair, and made her up to resemble Ruby, then drugged her. During the bridge game, Mark took a break, taking the drugged Pamela to Blake's hearth rug, where he strangled her with her belt. Just before midnight, when Ruby went up to change for the exhibition dance, Josie followed her and killed her by injection or a blow. After the midnight dance, she took Ruby, dressed in Pamela's clothes, in Bartlett's car to the quarry where she set fire to the car. During the police interrogation, Mark breaks down and confesses all the details.
Adelaide says she has agreed to marry her long-time suitor, Hugo, which pleases Jefferson. His new will settles cash on Adelaide and leaves the rest to her son Peter.
Literary significance and reception
Maurice Willson Disher of The Times Literary Supplement was impressed in his review of 16 May 1942 with the female view of life injected into the solution of the crimes. "Some devoted souls may sigh for Hercule Poirot, but there are bound to be others who will be glad to find his place taken in the 'new Agatha Christie' by Miss Marple. What this relief signifies is that professional detectives are no match for elderly spinsters (not all so elderly), with some training in looking under the antimacassar, who are now very much in fashion. Even while making full allowance for this we find it hard not to be impressed by old-maid logic. When Miss Marple says, 'The dress was all wrong,' she is plainly observing facts hidden from the masculine eye – facts which are of a very lively interest. The Body in the Library should turn Hendon College co-educational." [4]
Maurice Richardson was not as impressed with Christie's efforts in his 17 May 1942 review in The Observer when he concluded: "Ingenious, of course, but interest is rather diffuse and the red herrings have lost their phosphorescence." [5]
An unnamed reviewer in the Toronto Daily Star (21 March 1942) wrote that "It doesn't take long to read this one, but the two killings in it are made so mysterious that you will not want to lay the book down until the killer is caught." The reviewer concludes, "Police do a lot of probing, but it is the shrewd reasoning – intuition perhaps – of Jane Marple that finds the missing link and discloses a diabolical plot." [6]
Robert Barnard, writing in 1990, had a positive view of this novel. He calls the plot situation classic rather than clichéd. It was a "bravura performance on a classic situation". The shift of locations of action, from Miss Marple's village to a seaside resort hotel, were good for the story, "St Mary Mead regulars figure in the case, pleasantly diversified by fashionable seaside hotel guests and the film crowd." The question he raised involves the likelihood of the crimes and the manner of solving them, which he found better than a mystery written over 30 years later by another author, saying that "If you think what happens to the body after death is unlikely, try the more 'realistic' P.D. James' An Unsuitable Job for a Woman ." [7]
Allusions
In Chapter 8, the author gives herself a mention from the mouth of the young boy, Peter Carmody. Explaining that he enjoys reading detective stories, Peter says that he has the autographs of Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, John Dickson Carr and H. C. Bailey.
In Chapter 9, Colonel Melchett states that "there's still one thing to be done. Cherchez l'homme." It is referred to as a joke in the book, and is possibly a reference to Hercule Poirot, Christie's other famous sleuth. However, it is more likely a reference to the popular phrase cherchez la femme , meaning that there is frequently a woman behind a man's behaviour and motives in detective stories; since in this novel the victim was a girl, who was presumed to have a male lover, the phrase was changed jokingly by the detective.
While explaining how she concluded who the murderers were and how the widowed Mr Jefferson became so quickly enamoured of a girl while knowing so little of her, Miss Marple mentions the old story The King and the Beggar-maid as a model for instant emotional reaction. All the other characters in the novel she finds to have acted like someone she knew from life in her village.
In Christie's Cards on the Table , published six years earlier, Anne Meredith knows Ariadne Oliver as the writer of a book called The Body in the Library.
