The Body in the Library

Agatha Christie (1890-1976), a pillar of the “Golden Age” of detective fiction, is not only the most successful mystery writer of all time, but also the best-selling author of any fiction, period. Over her 50-year career, Christie published 66 detective novels and 14 short-story collections, which have collectively sold over 2 billion copies. Her first published novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920), introduced one of her two best-known detectives, the Belgian sleuth Hercule Poirot, and helped to popularize a new, genteel style of murder mystery that, in the decades after World War I, became a worldwide phenomenon. These puzzle-like mysteries, most of which were whodunnits, eschewed the explicit violence and psychological realism of earlier mystery writing, instead treating murder as an intricate, almost antiseptic “game” to test the wits of both detective and reader. This genre, now identified with the “Golden Age of Detective Fiction,” flourished throughout the 1920s and 1930s, only waning in popularity in the 1940s with the advent of World War II, though some writers still work variations on the genre to this day. Agatha Christie, who published whodunnits well into the 1970s, never altered her style significantly, and the enduring popularity of her books has helped keep the “Golden Age” mystery vibrantly alive into the 21st century, notably with the subgenre of the “cozy mystery.”

Christie introduced the character of Miss Jane Marple in a series of short stories in the late 1920s to explore a woman’s perspective on crime detection, contrasting the outwardly unassuming and practical-minded Miss Marple with the haughty Poirot. The first full-length Marple novel, Murder at the Vicarage (1930), established the basic character traits and tropes that Christie would refine over 11 further novels and numerous short stories: her home in the (fictional) village of St. Mary Mead, her mild demeanor, and her nimble use of mundane village anecdotes as analogs for criminality. Unlike the private detective Hercule Poirot, Marple is an amateur sleuth whose crime-solving seems as much a hobby as her gardening. The murders, some of which occur in St. Mary Mead, usually come to her notice through friends and acquaintances, such as the Bantrys in The Body in the Library, or fall into her path on travels or vacations, as in Death on the Nile or A Caribbean Mystery. Typically, a friend or admirer with some connection to law enforcement provides Marple with inside knowledge about the case; notably Sir Henry Clithering in The Body in the Library or Inspector Craddock in The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side. With these facts, and with no official oversight, Marple is at liberty to investigate the murder in her own, intuitive way, using her ingenuity, sagacity, and inimitable, village-bred understanding of human frailty.

Over time, the phenomenal success of Christie’s novels, particularly the Marple mysteries, helped create the subgenre of the “cozy mystery,” an especially genteel offshoot of the whodunnit. These mysteries, which are still popular, typically forego lurid violence, sexual themes, profanity, civic corruption, etc. Murders and other deaths almost always occur “offstage,” and wounds are never explicitly described. In this subgenre, the hero is usually an amateur sleuth, often an elderly woman (like Miss Marple), and the scene of the crime is typically a quaint village, country house, vacation resort, or other tranquil, isolated setting with a limited pool of suspects. The murders themselves are never sadistic or impulsive but cool, calculated acts of greed, or jealousy and perpetrated by unfailingly rational people. Otherwise, the “cozy mystery” follows the usual rules of the classic whodunnit; that is, the basic clues are provided early on, the (unknown) culprit must be mentioned frequently, the detective must not conceal any germane facts from the reader, and no random accidents or baseless intuition can figure in the detective’s cracking of the case.

Over the years, Christie came to prefer the gentle, unassuming Miss Marple to her other, less “cozy” creation Hercule Poirot, whose prickliness and vanity she came to find increasingly “insufferable.” After Christie’s death in 1976, two mysteries she wrote in the 1940s were, by her willed instructions, removed from a vault and published for the first time. Titled Curtain and Sleeping Murder, the two novels narrate the final cases, respectively, of Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple. Tellingly, in Curtain, Poirot dies—murdered by poison, a Christie specialty. In Sleeping Murder, on the other hand, Miss Marple retires from sleuthing to enjoy a peaceful, contented old age.