The Body in the Library

“Bodies are always being found in libraries in books. I’ve never known a case in real life.”

Colonel Bantry’s remark is a subtle example of “breaking the fourth wall”: By alluding to other whodunnit mysteries, in which a “body in the library” has become a cliché, Christie acknowledges the artificial, formulaic nature of the very genre she is writing in, while promising to do something fresh with it. As it happens, the victim turns out to have no connection whatsoever to the owners of the house, or to the library as a setting for her murder. The well-worn premise becomes an in-joke on Christie’s part, a way of slightly subverting the genre by toying with readers’ expectations about run-of-the-mill whodunnits.

“It was a cheap, tawdry, flamboyant figure—most incongruous in the solid old-fashioned comfort of Colonel Bantry’s library.”

In the Foreword to The Body in the Library, Christie explains how she deliberately set a challenge for herself by using the “well-known theme” of the title: The library must be extremely ordinary and “conventional,” as contrast to the “wildly improbable and highly sensational body” (vii). Unlike the typical whodunnit that might use this premise, the victim seems completely out of place: neither a resident of the house nor a likely visitor. The staid little world of the elderly, wealthy Bantrys, as exemplified by their musty library replete with stodgy décor and drab furnishings, seems to have no possible intersection with the garish demimonde of the “tawdry”-looking victim.