The Body in the Library 1942 detective book

Name: The Body in the Library
Rating: 4.2 (84 reviews)

The Body in the Library 1942 detective story

The Body in the Library (1942, United Kingdom)

This morning started in the Bantry residence in quite unusual way - the servants found a body of a strangled girl lying in front of a fireplace in the library. They wake up Colonel Bantry and his wife before calling the police. No one in the household has any idea who the dead girl is and the police officers, who arrive soon are baffled too. The most obvious suspect is the colonel himself - perhaps the girl was his secret lover or a child out of the wedlock - the whole village begins to buzz with whispers and speculation. Mrs Bantry invites over her friend, Jane Marple, who lives nearby and is famous for spotting things others are not able to spot, especially when it comes to crime. Miss Marple arrives to the scene and spots straight away that the dead girl is wearing an old and cheap dress, which would be an odd choice if she came here to meet Colonel Bantry for whatever reason. Also she spots heavy makeup and very shortly bitten fingernails of the deceased, but apart from those details nothing else seems to be pushing the investigation forward. Superintendent of the local police, Colonel Melchett, is looking for a ways to identify the victim when sudden phone call seems to solve at least that problem.

Second novel of Agatha Christie featuring amateur detective Miss Marple, again set in a peaceful village of St Mary Mead, where nothing as serious as murder had happened before. With investigation starting in a point where there seems to be no clues at all of what might have happened and who the victim is, the story step by step unveils more and more details and the list of the suspects only seems to be getting longer and longer. The novel is, in typical style of Agatha Christie, built in a way that the whole story is not really clear until the very end. The years that passed from the first edition in 1942 did not made The Body in the Library any less brilliant as it was almost a century ago.

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