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"Bodies are always being found in libraries in books. I've never known a case in real life."
The strangled corpse of a young blonde woman is found on the floor of the very respectable Mr. and Mrs. Bantry's library. They've never seen her before in their lives.
Mrs. Bantry promptly asks her friend Mrs. Marple to come over. Mrs. Marple says she's happy to provide what comfort she can. Mrs. Bantry replies, "I don't want comfort. But you're so good at bodies."
This book was enjoyable and a very good fair-play puzzle, but only sometimes hit the delightful fun of Murder at the Vicarage. (My favorite parts were the glee with which Mrs. Bantry approaches the bizarre murder early on, and the truly unexpected secret attached to the young man who recently moved to town and annoyed everyone by partying hard and carousing with blondes.)
The hard-partying dissolute young man is a surprise woobie SECRET HERO whose HEALTH WAS SHATTERED rescuing FOUR CHILDREN AND A DOG from a burning house! The sleazy blonde with whom he's living in sin is actually his perfectly nice wife! They're SECRETLY MARRIED because they're so annoyed the judgmental folks of St. Mary's Mead caring so much whether they are or aren't!
I correctly guessed that the bodies had been switched. I started wondering about that the moment they mentioned the missing girl guide, and because the hair/makeup were so distinctive that I thought it might make people only see that. But I thought Josie identified the corpse as Ruby by accident, because she was strangled and Josie just recognized her hair, clothes, and makeup, not that she did it on purpose.
I really liked the reason for the bizarre incongruity of an unknown body being dumped in the least likely house: the body had originally been dumped in a much more likely house to frame its owner. Only he found it early and, due to being both panicked and drunk, dumped it in someone else's house!
Christie scale: MEDIUM levels of CLASSISM and RACISM.
The strangled corpse of a young blonde woman is found on the floor of the very respectable Mr. and Mrs. Bantry's library. They've never seen her before in their lives.
Mrs. Bantry promptly asks her friend Mrs. Marple to come over. Mrs. Marple says she's happy to provide what comfort she can. Mrs. Bantry replies, "I don't want comfort. But you're so good at bodies."
This book was enjoyable and a very good fair-play puzzle, but only sometimes hit the delightful fun of Murder at the Vicarage. (My favorite parts were the glee with which Mrs. Bantry approaches the bizarre murder early on, and the truly unexpected secret attached to the young man who recently moved to town and annoyed everyone by partying hard and carousing with blondes.)
The hard-partying dissolute young man is a surprise woobie SECRET HERO whose HEALTH WAS SHATTERED rescuing FOUR CHILDREN AND A DOG from a burning house! The sleazy blonde with whom he's living in sin is actually his perfectly nice wife! They're SECRETLY MARRIED because they're so annoyed the judgmental folks of St. Mary's Mead caring so much whether they are or aren't!
I correctly guessed that the bodies had been switched. I started wondering about that the moment they mentioned the missing girl guide, and because the hair/makeup were so distinctive that I thought it might make people only see that. But I thought Josie identified the corpse as Ruby by accident, because she was strangled and Josie just recognized her hair, clothes, and makeup, not that she did it on purpose.
I really liked the reason for the bizarre incongruity of an unknown body being dumped in the least likely house: the body had originally been dumped in a much more likely house to frame its owner. Only he found it early and, due to being both panicked and drunk, dumped it in someone else's house!
Christie scale: MEDIUM levels of CLASSISM and RACISM.
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I really like when spontaneous secondary crime interferes with the best-laid plans of primary crime.
(I read this one decades ago and literally the only thing I remember about it is Basil and Dinah. I don't think I ever read Murder at the Vicarage and will have to go back for it.)
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Me too.
Basil and Dinah are very memorable.
She should definitely read Murder at the Vicarage. It's incredibly charming.
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I liked Raymond, too, who I hadn't remembered at all—his rueful little soliloquy at the end suggesting genuine attachment rather than money as primary motive, even if not one of the Devonshire Starrs after all. I appreciate the existence of random sympathetic professional dancers in Golden Age detective fiction (cf. Antoine in Have His Carcase).
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In this case, it's more that they were newly married when he bought the house in St Mary Mead, but were immediately assumed by local gossip to be living in sin—he's in the film industry and the wild parties are real—and so just decided not to tell anyone the truth to the contrary, not even his mother; the only reason they agree to "own up and admit to respectability" is that they are advised by Miss Marple that they'll need all the sympathy they can get from their neighbors as soon as the husband is arrested for the murder he didn't commit and lawful matrimony is much more sympathetic to an old-fashioned small village than flamboyant bohemia, so strategically disclose that marriage stat! (The actual murderers are caught within a day of the husband's arrest, so nothing long-term awful is going to happen to him and I assume nothing about their lifestyle is actually going to change except they might now have to interact with their neighbors, which they had hitherto successfully avoided thanks to being so scandalous.)
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I choose to believe the Bantrys and the Blakes became extremely close friends.
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I felt very sorry for the colonel being in the middle of the scandal.
And the TV version rather annoyed me by the change in the plot. Why change anything if you have an Agatha Christie plot? (then again, it was an early episode and the later one had even more weird changes. This one just really annoyed me because of rot13 fhecevfr zheqrebhf yrfovnaf).
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