The Body in the Library

One advantage Miss Marple has over the rank and file of law enforcement is her intuitive skepticism. Policemen, she tells Colonel Melchett, tend to “believe what is told them. I never do” (198). Secretiveness and deception being innately human traits, a small village like St. Mary Mead abounds in double lives, if only to keep the town busybodies at arm’s length. Marple easily sees through the façade of Basil Blake and Dinah Lee, a married couple who have been pretending to “live in sin” in order to shock the provincials and keep away “old frumps” like herself. Marple deduces their married status from their jaded, lived-in bickering, and cautions that their cavalier pranks will someday get them into serious trouble. Indeed, Basil has already played a mean-spirited “joke” on Colonel Bantry by depositing a corpse through his library window and then lying to the police about it. For Basil and Dinah, secretiveness and deception are their revenge on “stuffy” neighbors who, they believe, look down on their freewheeling lifestyle. Indeed, Basil clings so tenaciously to his “bad boy” image that he conceals his heroic past, such as his rescue of four children from a fire during WWI.

Other characters in The Body in the Library, of course, harbor less innocent secrets.