The Body in the Library

The Body in the Library begins, shockingly enough, with a body in a library. Scandalous!

The servants at Gossington Hall in St. Mary Mead discover a body in the library one morning, sending the household into a tizzy. In the introduction of the book it felt like the story was so preoccupied with its central conceit (that there was a body in the library!) I was worried it would shirk its duty to provide a compelling mystery, but that fortunately turned out to be a misplaced fear.

One of the most extraordinary things about the body in the library is that nobody knows who she is. She's a beautiful young woman (or at least, she was when she was alive), so the obvious theory is that she was a mistress of the master of the house, but he vehemently denies this. After a bit of digging, the police discover that the victim was a dancer at a hotel in the next town over.

I actually found this aspect of the book a bit jarring, since the introduction seems obsessed with repeating the punchline that there's a body in the library as often as it can, but after the opening segment the setting completely shifts from Gossington Hall to the hotel where the victim worked. Why make such a big deal about the library if you're going to leave it as soon as you can? Apparently having bodies in the library was a common trope at the time, so it almost feels like a hotel-based mystery wearing the library introduction as a mask to poke fun at the cliché.

This book uses my favorite type of Christie trick (which I will not elaborate on, lest I spoil it), and there are a lot of clues that you can tell are clues but not how they will tie into the solution. The decisive clues felt a bit subtle for Christie, but I think it's fine for Christie to have a more difficult book every once in a while.

I also appreciated The Body in the Library narratively a bit more than most mystery novels, mostly because everything works out well for everybody besides the guilty. It's always nice when that happens.

Even though The Body in the Library initially seems like it's going to be a joke novel based around a single punchline, that's just a cover for a solid, clever Christie-styled mystery.