60 pages • 2-hour read
The Body in the Library
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Symbols & Motifs
Content Warning: This section of the guide features discussion of death, graphic violence, and gender discrimination.
Secrets
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. Mark Gaskell and Josie Turner, for instance, have been keeping their marriage secret for a full year so as not to alienate Mark’s wealthy benefactor and father-in-law, Conway Jefferson. This subterfuge also allows Josie to act as Mark’s accomplice in the murder of Ruby Keene without being suspected—until Miss Marple checks the marriage records at Somerset House.
Josie’s dancing partner at the hotel, Raymond West, though not a murderer, is nevertheless guilty of cold-blooded deception: Hoping to marry a rich woman like Adelaide Jefferson, he spins elaborate yarns about his tragic past as one of the Alsmonston Starrs, an aristocratic family that went destitute. Perhaps the book’s most tragic case of secretiveness is that of Pamela Reeves, the naïve Girl Guide whom Mark and Josie abduct and murder to give themselves an alibi for Ruby’s killing. Pretending to go to Woolworth’s after a rally, Pamela secretly meets up with Mark at the Majestic Hotel, supposedly for a movie audition. Had she told her family or friends the truth, they might have helped her avoid danger. The one friend she does confide in (Florence Small) persists in lying for her even after her disappearance. As Marple notes, this could be out of fear of being blamed—for not stopping Pamela, or for not speaking up sooner. In any case, it falls to Marple, with her copious “village parallels” of teenagers’ secrets, slyness, and fibs, to shame the truth out of her.
The Bantrys’ Library
In the socially stratified England of The Body in the Library, Colonel Bantry’s library becomes a (literally) walled-off microcosm of aristocratic privilege, comfort, and privacy. Like the English upper-class itself, four decades after its Victorian apex, the room has clearly seen better days: Described as “typical of its owners” (10), it is “large and shabby and untidy” (10), with family portraits, “some bad Victorian water colours, and some would-be-funny hunting scenes” (11), which speak of “long occupation and familiar use and of links with tradition” (11). Colonel Bantry’s library offers him a genteel sanctuary from the ever-accelerating pace of modernity, which includes such neighbors as Basil Blake, a dissolute young man who trumpets his decadent lifestyle and coarse manners.
Christie’s whodunnit begins with a surreal juxtaposition: A rouged, platinum-blonde exemplar of demotic modernity sprawled, mysteriously, in the elderly colonel’s inner-sanctum of stodgy gentility. Ruby Keene, the lower-class young woman in question, hardly needs to be dead in order to shock the village with her presence; the fact that she has been strangled only adds an extra layer of frisson to the scandal. As it happens, her appearance in the library turns out to be a deliberate attack on the Colonel’s reputation and values by the ultra-modern Basil Blake, to punish the “pompous old stick” for looking down on him (184). The titular “body in the library” stands as a metaphor for the collapsing barriers of class hierarchy and privilege in the modern age.
Dancing
In The Body in the Library, three of the story’s principals work as professional dancers at a seaside resort that caters largely to a wealthy clientele; not coincidentally, all three of them aspire to move up to a higher social rung, either through marriage or adoption. Dancers, in the increasingly democratic England of the novel’s setting, seem ideally suited to attract aging, upper-class lonely hearts, being physically alluring, dynamic, and (relatively) young; their job, of course, brings them into close contact with the rich in a leisurely, romantic setting conducive to amorous fantasy. Unlike virtually any other members of their class, their daily work compels them to act out the motions of romance with (or in the midst of) an ever-changing cast of aging, upper-crust guests, giving them endless opportunities to lure a receptive eye or body with their practiced charm and lithe physicality.
The three dancers seem, at first, on the verge of success. Unfortunately, Ruby Keene, the “body in the library,” dooms herself with the very triumph of her pas de deux with Conway Jefferson, since it threatens the prospects of her cousin Josie Turner, who has danced her way into a secret marriage with Mark Gaskell. Meanwhile, Josie’s professional dance partner Raymond Starr finds some success with Adelaide Jefferson, Conway’s widowed daughter-in-law. Her longtime suitor, the awkward Hugo McLean, cannot dance a step. However, Adelaide, a single mother, eventually looks beyond physical grace for something more substantive and dependable, choosing the ever-patient Hugo after all. Josie Turner, by novel’s end, lacks the nimbleness to get away with murder, and both she and Mark ascend to a different dance floor (the gallows). All three dancers turn out to woefully flat-footed in their social-climbing dreams of wealth and power.
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