Agatha Christie is one of my dependable go-to authors for a good comfort read, which is primarily what I seem to be drawn to at the moment. I've been very slowly working my way through the Miss Marple mysteries, which I am trying to read in the order they were written (or at least the order listed here). I've just finished The Body in the Library, so you can see I am still at the beginning of the list. This isn't such a bad thing really as that means there is more murderous goodness to come. I like the snug little world of St. Mary Mead, though the events in this story take place in a neighboring village. Although not my favorite Agatha Christie novel (that honor goes to Death on the Nile at the moment), it was an enjoyable read and as always a good puzzle to solve, which I didn't manage to do by the way.
A couple of things that strike me about Miss Marple now that I have a few stories under my belt. Unlike M. Poirot, she seems to enter into the action (such as it is) of the story well after the mystery is under way. And she doesn't really sleuth out the solution like a detective, but solves the crime via observation and drawing from her vast experience with human nature. It would seem that St. Mary Mead gets all kinds--lots of bad behavior in Jane's quaint little village. Miss Marple has quite a reputation and even the detectives on the case have a certain admiration for her.
"Downstairs in the lounge, by the third pillar from the left, there sits an old lady with a sweet, placid, spinsterish face and a mind that has plumbed the depths of human iniquity and taken it as all in the day's work. Her name's Miss Marple. She comes from the village of St. Mary Mead, which is a mile and a half from Gossington; she's a friend of the Bantrys and, where crime is concerned, she's the goods, Conway."
She doesn't base her theories on 'women's intuition', rather "specialized knowledge is her claim".
"Miss Marple has an interesting, though occasionally trivial, series of parallels from village life."
The body in the library is that of a beautiful young woman who has appeared strangled and sprawled out in the Bantrys' library. She is unknown to the family and no one has a clue who she is or how she ended up there. It's sort of reverse locked room mystery if you think about it. It's one thing to end up murdered in your own house with the doors and windows closed, but something else entirely to find someone murdered on the hearthrug under the same conditions who doesn't belong there. Miss Marple mysteries are nothing if not clever.
Although Mrs. Bantry calls Miss Marple, her good friend, just after the body is discovered, and the two immediately embark on a little investigative questioning, and with a certain amount of glee (I mean how often does a freshly murdered body present itself in your own home?), the ladies then take a back seat to the detectives--good solid men from the area (including a former Scotland Yard detective) who work their way through the clues but don't quite come to a satisfactory conclusion.
I don't think I'll be giving anything away by mentioning that the murdered woman ends up being one of the employees at a nearby hotel who gave dance performances for the guests. Not one of the regular dancers, however, as her cousin asked her to cover for her when she sprained her ankle, so it was her bad luck to end up murdered. Just prior she had caught the eye of one of the wealthier guests who had been widowed recently. Worse, he had lost not just his wife but also two grown children in a car accident. But he had liberally shared his money with the spouses of his deceased children whom he keeps close at his side. Perhaps it's not strange, then, that he had decided to shower his wealth on the murdered girl by adopting her. What does the murderer hope to gain through her death is the question. And there are no end of suspects at the hotel.
Clever Miss Marple will suss out the murderer, of course. And Christie will lob a fair few red herrings the readers' way before the crime is solved. It's a twisty turny solution, that of course makes perfect sense when the motivations and explanations as to just how the murder was committed are revealed. Classic Agatha Christie. She is a fun read. A good thing to remember when reading mysteries in general, and Miss Marple was kind enough to remind me, never trust anyone. Miss Marple likes to prove the facts for herself, which is always a good place to start (and end)!
Although I probably won't dive into the next one right away, The Moving Finger, is Miss Marple's next case. A long time ago I picked up the first Tommy and Tuppence novel (which I ended up setting aside in a moment of distraction), The Secret Adversary, and I wouldn't mind reading it properly now. Or maybe I'll read one of Agatha Christie's standalone novels. In any case I have lots of books by Agatha Christie to discover still. There are so many good ones to choose from, I'm glad now that she is an author I managed to not discover when I was young.