The Body in the Library

In the relatively small social arenas of The Body in the Library, word gets around quickly, and gossip can be a force for both good and ill. Miss Marple, whose granular knowledge of human behavior (particularly folly) is central to her investigations, depends as much on local gossip as Scotland Yard does on their criminal case files. A human repository of what Sir Henry Clithering calls “village parallels,” Marple arrives at many of her solutions by way of similar events she has personally witnessed or heard about, most of which have nothing to do with crime per se. In The Body in the Library, for instance, she references a housemaid who finagled her way into the affections of an elderly acquaintance of Marple’s (Mr. Harbottle), as precedent for Conway Jefferson’s infatuation with the dancer Ruby Keene. Later, she relates the corpse’s appearance in the Bantrys’ library to a prank by a village boy who hid a frog in his teacher’s clock.

These tidbits of small-town gossip, most of which hardly rise to the level of scandal, are Marple’s proving ground, and her command of them is encyclopedic. Though police detectives may find them irrelevant or even small-minded, Christie’s third-person narrator credits such seemingly trivial anecdotes for Marple’s celebrated success: “Miss Marple had attained fame by her ability to link up trivial village happenings with graver problems in such a way as to throw light upon the latter” (14).