Monday, September 8, 2014

The Body in the Library by Agatha Christie

The Body in the Library by Agatha Christie
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

An enjoyable book, the first Agatha Christie I’d read.
I had been re-watching Murder She Wrote lately and came upon an idea to read this book. Miss Marple does really take a back seat in this story so it’s difficult to really get to know her. The murder however is well thought out, with every line seemingly leading to a dead end and no idea where to begin to solve it.
One of the couple of clues given relates to a cockney kind of slang term I hadn’t heard before so I didn’t really understand it when I read it and just skipped over it, so I couldn’t really have guessed who did it.
Christie writes in a very straight-forward way, I noted the quote:
“We’ve got it, I think. That was the Glenshire Police” (Glenshire was the adjoining county).
I don’t think I’ve ever seen explanation written just in a bracket like that with no attempt to work it into a story. It seemed kind of slapdash. But I guess it all relates to the straight, no-nonsense approach Christie took. With the reverence of her cannon and the time it was written I expected a more literary style, but it was very relatable even today, eighty years later.

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