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). Marple’s keen understanding of everyday social cues, especially her understanding of how and why people lie, gives her an advantage over the professional detectives—all of them men—who regard criminality as separate from everyday life.

Village gossip, of course, has its dark side as well, and in The Body in the Library, the village scandal-mongers nearly add another body (Colonel Bantry’s) to the novel’s death toll. The highly respectable colonel, in whose library the corpse of the racy-looking Ruby Keene is found, quickly becomes the target of village innuendo, as neighbors suspect him of an affair at the very least. In a small village with highly conservative and censorious social attitudes, this kind of gossip can be ruinous for its targets. Marple, an expert on gossip, knows the likely consequences for Bantry if the murder is not solved quickly: “A slight here, and a snub there, and invitations that are refused, and excuses that are made, and then […] he’ll retire into his shell and get terribly morbid and miserable” (100). For Bantry, an “abnormally sensitive” man who cares desperately about his reputation, this long-term censure could well become a death of 1,000 cuts.

Indeed, within an hour or two of the body’s discovery, the darkest suppositions are being bruited about by such “moral” watchdogs as Miss Hartnell and Miss Wetherby, who says of Bantry, “Those quiet ones are often the worst” (41). It is up to Marple, then, to use her “village parallels” to save her friend from being ground into bits by the local gossip mill. Though Inspector Slack may look down on Marple’s “trivial” village lore, he lacks the human insight that comes with it: that even in the most idyllic of English towns, an idle tongue can be as deadly as a knife.