Chapter 11 The body in the library in the fiction of Agatha Christie and her ‘Golden Age’ contemporaries

A number of creators of amateur detectives – notably Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers and Michael Innes – were aware of the usefulness of a literary upbringing in an era when the average policeman acquired no more than elementary schooling. It is a characteristic of ‘Golden Age’ detective fiction (1920s–40s) that the well-educated private sleuth should be pitted against the lesser educated ‘other’, the plodding policeman who obeys the rules: Sayers’s Lord Peter Wimsey, for instance, attended Eton and Balliol.¹ And with education come books and libraries. Agatha Christie may not have patented the body in the library, but she certainly lent it more life (or rather, death). Usually the library is merely a stage setting in detective fiction, but some writers considered books and libraries in more bibliographical detail.² This chapter considers the multiple ways in which books and libraries are deployed and represented in a selection of novels and stories by Christie and some of her Golden Age contemporaries.

Agatha Christie was a brisk, witty, easy-to-read writer, whose style was often criticised by contemporaries. Fellow-practitioner J. I. M. Stewart, alias Michael Innes, condemned her prose as ‘flat and cliché-ridden and undistinguished’, containing forgettable, precise details; but, he added grudgingly, the flatness was her own brilliant method of deflecting the reader’s attention by deceit, citing The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926), where the narrator looks back at the study, ‘wondering if there was anything I had left undone’.³ Few critics and writers of the interwar period took crime novels seriously, though many enjoyed reading them. Although Robert Graves criticised Christie’s ‘schoolgirlish’ prose, he privately appreciated her writing, commenting that detective stories were not meant to be realistic, just as Watteau’s paintings of shepherds and shepherdesses did not represent the realities of eighteenth-century sheep-farming.⁴ Christie herself was proud to be a lowbrow writer read by highbrows: Samuel Beckett, Ludwig Wittgenstein, George Orwell, Graham Greene, all loved her books.

Post-war, Christie suffered from over-academisation.⁵ Critical approaches range from the Marxist, with Ernst Bloch’s condemnation of Hercule Poirot because he ‘intuits the totality of the case in accordance with the increasingly irrational modes of thinking characteristic of late bourgeois society’,⁶ to the feminist, for example with Merja Makinen arguing that Christie was writing in a period of ‘gender renegotiation’ and was making women more dominant and men more passive.⁷ Such criticisms are legitimate avenues of exploration, but may confuse the question of how crime novels might best be understood. Exploration of the use of books and libraries within the books resists possible over-intellectualisation while properly acknowledging authorial skill.

This use of books in Golden Age detective fiction reflects the historical period. Both Christie’s major protagonists, Poirot and Miss Marple, are vestiges of the Great War: Poirot is a refugee and Marple’s only known beau did not return from the Front. The underlying memory of the horrors of war haunts crime fiction of the period. Shocking as murder may be, Alison Light has referred to crime novels of this era as ‘literature of convalescence’ because its readers, psychologically affected by the cultural shocks brought on by war, sought books in which a solution is offered amidst the uncertainty of the times; this interpretation could apply to the aftermath of any unsettled period.⁸ Christie, although her personal interest in crime fiction predated the First World War, read detective novels as a VAD in a Torquay hospital for escapism.⁹ Fiction reflects the historical attitude: Wimsey was afflicted by shell shock, and read detective fiction as a refuge.¹⁰ Escapism and nostalgia are more significant ingredients than readers’ reactions to war.

Samantha Walton has emphasised the importance of psychology and the uneasy relationship between crime and sanity, or rather, insanity.¹¹ Christie was subversive; the possibility of an insane murderer often lurks below the surface. Although her novels may have familiar ‘cosy’ settings, the introduction of dead bodies into the home unsettles the reader by undermining and disturbing the normal social adhesion of their lives, or how they perceive their lives. Motives for murder often reveal dark family secrets or suspicions of insanity. By setting a murder in a library, Christie contrasted the improbability and sensationalism of the crime with a ‘highly orthodox and conventional’ location, whereby books and libraries symbolise civilisation and respectability. She liked to upset readers with the incongruous, and what is more upsetting to the ordered rhythm of life in the average village than the presence of a murdered person in the one domestic room which should be full of comfort, familiarity and above all, order? Readers were made to feel that there could be no hiding place from murder and that the murderer might belong to their own community.¹²

Christie’s fictional engagement with libraries stems from voracious childhood reading, producing a fascination with rhymes and quotations from Shakespeare and the Bible.¹³ In accordance with her utterance that: ‘I couldn’t possibly write about miners talking in pubs because I simply do not know what miners talk about in pubs’,¹⁴ her stories are often set in the upper middle-class milieu familiar to her from her ‘coming-out’ years in Torquay when she regularly visited the houses of the local gentry, all of which would have contained a family library. The books in Christie’s library at Greenway (now owned by the National Trust), Christie’s holiday home in Devon, offer clues to her character. Greenway’s library shelves contain a cloth-bound working collection of the ‘ordinary’ books which most people read.¹⁵ Mark Purcell has argued that the National Trust country house library enfolds different purposes including the scholarly, the entertaining, the self-improving and ‘the repository of family memory’.¹⁶ Greenway’s library contains all those elements, but especially the last. At its core lie books collected by Christie’s parents and those which provided her education; she never attended school. Her American father bought shelves of classic fiction, poetry and magazines. Books and religion were important to her mother: ‘There was a picture of St Francis by her bed, and she read The Imitation of Christ [attributed to Thomas à Kempis] night and morning. That same book lies always by my bed.’¹⁷

Christie’s parents ensured that she received suitable books, including gifts from her great-aunt Margaret (an inspiration for Miss Marple). Many of her father’s books were kept in a room which Christie requisitioned and contained Lewis Carroll, Charlotte M. Yonge, G. A. Henty, schoolbooks and more novels. Henty’s adventure stories were great favourites of other detective story writers and of her brother Monty, who joined the King’s African Rifles. Christie was not the only crime writer to have read avidly while young. Rex Stout devoured his father’s library of 1,200 books by the age of ten, while Dorothy L. Sayers, a vicar’s daughter, endured a lonely childhood in the Cambridgeshire fens, only relieved by reading.¹⁸ Young Christie acquired a circle of imaginary friends who read real books, and their imaginary signatures can be found in several volumes. According to her Autobiography, one friend was Sue de Verte,¹⁹ but Greenway’s copy of Les Petites Filles Modèles (1896) by the Comtesse de Ségur is inscribed ‘Sue de Morte’. Christie’s memory let her down; the youthful Agatha Christie played with a companion called Death, a fact not revealed in biographies.

Greenway contains volumes owned by both of Christie’s husbands, her son-in-law Anthony Hicks and her sister Madge, who married the Manchester textile merchant James Watts and lived in Abney Hall, Cheadle, with a large ‘universal’ library. Over half their books were housed in the billiard room, emphasising the Victorian male domain. At Greenway, as in any private house, the designated library was never the sole depository for books, which spread to Christie’s bedroom with many books, and even to the kitchen and the imposing, long, narrow, first-floor mahogany lavatory.

Christie had fiction, as well as her own background, to inspire her when deploying libraries in her fiction. She was particularly fond of two American crime story writers whose amateur detectives lived in New York City and were book lovers with splendid libraries. Elizabeth Daly’s antiquarian scholar and bibliophile, Henry Gamadge, boasted a Chesterfield sofa in his library as well as a round table in the window where he and his wife dined (a dumb waiter rose directly from the kitchen),²⁰ while the library of the young literary sleuth and writer, Ellery Queen, was also his living room with its oak-ribbed ceiling and ‘massive furniture’ of divans, footstools and leather cushions, ‘a veritable fairyland of easy bachelordom’. The room was ‘Dotted with books, massed with books’, all ‘well-used’. Entering his apartment ‘an odour redolent of old leather and masculinity would assail the nostrils’, according to The French Powder Mystery (1930), in which Queen unravels a murder after realising the significance of particular non-fiction books found on the library desk of the murdered woman’s husband. The titles are invented, as are the names of the authors – Morrison, Wedjowski, Throckmorton, Freyberg and so on. Ellery eventually realises that the books – which are completely unlike the rest of the works in the library, whose owner preferred Jack London and the like – are significant because the first two letters of each author’s names correspond to days of the week – Monday, Wednesday and so on. They are part of a code indicating meeting days of a drug syndicate; an ingenious bibliographical ruse.²¹ Queen is present when a body, with an Etruscan dagger in its back, is discovered on the library floor in a house where he is a guest in The Finishing Stroke, published in 1958 but set in 1929. No books are identified, but the library setting is typical for the crime.

Libraries appear in Christie’s fiction from her first published novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920), in which Hastings visits a country house in Essex, ‘ransacking the library until I discovered a medical book which gave a description of strychnine poisoning’ (ch. 4).²² This was when a country house book collection encompassed every conceivable topic – the ‘universal library’ – just like the tomes in Lord Peter Wimsey’s family home (see below). Fictional personal libraries, like Christie’s actual library at Greenway, fit their owner’s needs. In The Sittaford Mystery (1931), Emily visits the Dartmoor cottage of an amateur ornithologist ‘but by far the greater part of the bookcases was given up to criminology and the world’s famous trials’.²³ Christie collected similar material, and books on poisons, naturally. Her books are not arranged in any order; fussy Poirot castigates Captain Hastings when he misplaces a book: ‘ “See you not that the tallest books go in the top shelf, the next tallest in the row beneath, and so on. Thus we have order, method, which, as I have often told you, Hastings – ” “Exactly,” I said hastily, and put the offending volume in its proper place.’²⁴ Poirot’s fussiness is complemented by his secretary, the ‘unbelievably ugly and incredibly efficient’ Miss Lemon, a living machine whose purpose in life was to create a perfect filing system named after her.²⁵ The control and organisation of information is as important as the physical arrangement of books.

Many Christie stories feature apparently locked rooms.²⁶ Christie favoured the ‘closed circle’ genre, where the number of suspects is limited, as in Murder on the Orient Express (1934), Death in the Clouds (1935), set in an aeroplane, and And Then There Were None (1939), which takes place on an island. For Christie, country houses are the perfect setting for a ‘closed circle’ murder because they contain an entire community, with resident gentry, visitors and servants; a village in miniature, as Miss Marple realised, with petty spites and gossip. Christie thought that they were the best location for her stories because they were so recognisable. Libraries fit into this. Christie was familiar with Anna Katharine Green’s American classic The Leavenworth Case (1878), read to her at the age of eight, in which the victim is shot dead in his locked library.²⁷

The library is equally important whether inside or outside the home. In After the Funeral (1953) a woman is murdered (by hatchet) in her cottage while her housekeeper is in Reading, changing the victim’s library books; the setting is all the more unsettling for being mundane. Libraries give ambience. The reading of the will is held in the library because the room ‘had the proper atmosphere for that with its bookshelves and its heavy red velvet curtains’.²⁸ A library plays a subtle role in the play Spider’s Web (1954). Christie gives instructions for a stage set of a drawing room with bookshelves but specifies a door leading to a library, only visible when a concealed switch is pressed. The main character, Clarissa, speculates on what she would do if she found a body in the library. At the denouement the police inspector conceals himself in that library; its hidden presence is central to the plot. Libraries are intended to be significant locations.

The well-loved domestic library reflects its owners’ personality. At Gossington Hall in St Mary Mead, Colonel and Mrs Dolly Bantry’s library:

was a room very typical of its owners. It was large and shabby and untidy. It had big sagging arm-chairs, and pipes and books and estate papers laid out on the big table. There were one or two good old family portraits on the walls, and some bad Victorian water-colours, and some would-be-funny hunting scenes. There was a big vase of Michaelmas daisies in the corner. The whole room was dim and mellow and casual. It spoke of long occupation and familiar use and of links with tradition.²⁹

This evokes the ‘repository of family memory’ style of library, but lying on the floor is a young, dead blonde girl – The Body in the Library (1942), the classic novel of this genre. ‘Bodies are always being found in libraries in books’, expostulates Colonel Bantry; ‘I’ve never known a case in real life.’ Dolly comments to Miss Marple: ‘I only hope that Arthur won’t take a dislike to the library. We sit there so much.’ This is the library as comfort zone. It also reveals the body as theatre, displayed to contrast the hideous nature of murder with the ‘other’, the normal everyday life of the country house. The body is initially wrongly identified – deceit is a key element in any Christie novel. Miss Marple solves the crime, relying on village gossip and her knowledge of the evil that exists in a small community; her experiences act as a counter to the conventional thinking of the (male) police.³⁰

In Murder Is Easy (1939), the murderer is the unpaid librarian of the public library in Wychwood-under-Ashe, endowed inside a former manor house. The body of a young boy is discovered by an elderly lady who is run down while on the way to Scotland Yard to report her suspicions. The stereotypical librarian is ‘completely the country spinster … neatly dressed in a tweed coat and skirt … Her face was pleasant and her eyes, through their pince-nez, decidedly intelligent.’³¹ Her motive is that she has been jilted: ‘First of all I just thought of killing him. That’s when I began to read up criminology – quietly, you know – in the library. And really I found my reading came in most useful more than once later.’³² The advantages of working in a library!

Christie is not the only detective writer to show an interest in libraries and books, or to make the presence of a library in the home a statement of social class. Dorothy L. Sayers’s wealthy and erudite detective Lord Peter Death Bredon Wimsey accumulated a large collection of antiquarian books with fine, calf bindings, housed in his flat in London’s Piccadilly, as described in Whose Body? (1923).³³ The library overlooked Green Park and was furnished with two leather-upholstered chairs, a huge Chesterfield sofa, Chippendale table, writing bureau and a baby grand piano for relaxation; the colour scheme was black and primrose.³⁴ The room’s comfort contrasts markedly with the state of Wimsey’s mind when he endures flashbacks to the Great War. His book collection included several incunabula such as Francesco Colonna’s Hypnerotermachia Poliphili (Venice: Aldus Manutius, 1499), Apollonios Rhodios’s Argonautica (Florence, 1496), Dante’s Divina Commedia (1477, 1481, and a post-incunable edition of 1501), The Golden Legend (Wynkyn de Worde, 1494), Petronius’s Satyricon (Venice, 1499), and Vitruvius’s De Architectura (Rome, 1486), as well as manuscripts of John Donne, Catullus and more. In describing this collection Sayers transfers her own appreciation of scholarship to her literary hero; the focus on Dante, in particular, reflects the passion which led Sayers to translate the Inferno and Purgatory of his Divine Comedy for Penguin.³⁵

On one side are books on crime, or, as Wimsey points out in Unnatural Death (1927), detected crimes. He collected the Notable British Trials series and naturally owned the collected works of Harriet Vane and his own publication, Notes on the Collection of Incunabula.³⁶ This is a serious collection, though the noble lord lived round the corner from the London Library; whether he patronised this well-stocked subscription library (or the convenient scholarly libraries of the Society of Antiquaries and the Royal Institution) is unknown. He did borrow (sending his manservant, Bunter) from The Times Book Club, one of the largest circulating libraries in the metropolis, situated in Oxford Street, later in Wigmore Street. Many of his creator’s first readers would have borrowed their copies from such establishments.

Lord Peter was heir to Bredon Hall in the Norfolk village of Duke’s Denver whose library belonged to his non-bibliophile brother, Gerald, the duke. Peter comments dismissively: ‘My brother, being an English gentleman, possesses a library in all his houses, though he never opens a book. This is called fidelity to ancient tradition. The chairs, however, are comfortable.’³⁷ Peter and his new wife, Harriet, visit Bredon Hall. The library was of the ‘universal’ variety but: ‘it isn’t what it ought to be. It’s full of the most appalling rubbish and the good stuff isn’t properly catalogued.’ Harriet inspects the library ‘with its tall bays and overhanging gallery, … Harriet found it restful. She wandered along pulling out here and there a calf-bound volume at random, sniffing the sweet, musty odour of ancient books.…’³⁸ She encounters an elderly man in a dressing gown who smiles at her, bows, and continues reading a book. He was, according to Peter, a distant cousin of the duke. That is, the duke who lived in the reign of William and Mary.

Not all domestic libraries were full of earnest non-fiction, as the ingenious The Murder of My Aunt (1934) by Richard Hull (pseudonym of Richard Henry Sampson) shows. The narrator abhors his aunt’s choices of literature:

my aunt has nothing in the house fit to read. It’s full of Surtees and Dickens and Thackeray and Kipling and dreadful hearty people like that whom no one reads now, while my aunt’s taste in modern novels runs to the Good Companions [by J. B. Priestley], If Winter Comes [by A. S. M. Hutchinson], or that interminable man, Hugh Walpole. Of course I have made my own arrangements – partly with the Next Century Book Club and partly with an admirable little French Library I found behind the British Museum. Some very amusing stuff they send me at times.³⁹

The aunt delights in suggesting he walk to the nearest town to collect a parcel of books with an obscured address label but meant for him, the only person in the neighbourhood to read such books. The sender would obscure the label, claims his aunt, because they ‘don’t want them back through the post in case, in making enquiries, the police read them’. Motives for murder are stacking up.

Motives for acquiring books can be confused. In Edgar Wallace’s The Books of Bart (1923), an aspiring author owns an ‘accidental’ collection:

One wall of the study was occupied by bookshelves, in which had assembled a whole tatterdemalion army of books, ranging from the costly volumes which Bartholomew purchased at sales, in moments of mental aberration, to the paper-covered novels which were the relics of innumerable railway journeys, and were now preserved because they contained ‘ideas’ which Bartholomew had indicated with conspicuous blue pencil marks, though he could never recall the ideas they suggested when he came to examine the books.⁴⁰

It has already been seen how Lord Peter Wimsey’s library reflects both the wealth and scholarship of its owner, and the French Inspector Gabriel Hanaud states concisely the library’s importance in revealing its owner’s character in A. E. W. Mason’s The House of the Arrow (1920): ‘I have always thought that if one only had the time to study and compare the books which a man buys and reads, one would more surely get the truth of him than in any other way. But alas, one never has the time.’⁴¹ A book is missing from the library of a murdered professor but reappears the next day; inside, Hanaud discovers a reference to a poisoned arrow.⁴²

A revelatory private library features in John Dickson Carr’s short story, The Shadow of the Goat (1926). The owner’s ‘hobby was sorcery and the deadly arts, in pursuit of which he had a library stuffed with forgotten books – the works of Hermes the Egyptian, Lillius, Geber, James Stuart, Cotton Mather, all of them. He belonged in a day when they burned such men.’⁴³ Lord Peter Wimsey believed that books revealed stages of a person’s development ‘like lobster-shells. We surround ourselves with ’em, and then we grow out of ’em.’⁴⁴ In Clouds of Witness (1926) the ownership of erotic books points towards a mystery’s solution. A murder victim’s books on Russian royalty in Have His Carcase (1932) explain the obsession which leads him to his death. In the rarely used library featured in The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club (1928) occurs a death by shooting. This novel is replete with references to Lewis Carroll’s Alice and the upside-down world of Wonderland.⁴⁵

In the above examples, it is bibliographical or bibliophilic interest which provides the link between library and personality. This is not always the case. Miss Marple’s nephew finds himself in a decayed domestic library in Agatha Christie’s ‘Greenshaw’s Folly’ (1956): ‘From what he could see from a cursory glance, there was no book here of any real interest or, indeed, any book which appeared to have been read. They were all superbly bound sets of the classics as supplied ninety years ago for furnishing a gentleman’s library.’⁴⁶ The reference to ‘classics’ being ‘supplied’ underlines the unpalatable truth that universal libraries could be acquired whole – bought by the yard – for show. The elderly houseowner, soon to be murdered, has hidden her will inside Lady Audley’s Secret, Mary Braddon’s once notorious potboiler from 1862 – no one reads it in Miss Marple’s time. What the fact of the library indicates is decayed gentility.

It is not merely the entire library which provides a clue to its owner’s character. Individual books, too, reveal much about their owners. In Christie’s Lord Edgware Dies (1933), Captain Hastings finds the books of the dislikeable and ‘vaguely effeminate’ Lord Edgware are too revealing: ‘There were the Memoirs of Casanova, also a volume on the Comte de Sade, another on mediæval tortures.’⁴⁷ Edgware is a deeply unpleasant and dominating man, especially to his wife and immediate circle, and so Lord Edgware dies – and in his own library (although unlocked). In Murder in Mesopotamia (1936) Poirot examines the books of the murdered archaeologist, Mrs Leidner, concluding from them that she ‘had brains, and … was, essentially, an egoist’. They are real book titles about strong-minded women, and Poirot recognises that she was not a sensual woman but had intellectual interests and ‘essentially worshipped herself and who enjoyed more than anything else the sense of power’.⁴⁸ Leidner was based on Katharine Woolley, the domineering, hypochondriac wife of Leonard Woolley, the excavator at Ur for whom Christie’s future husband worked.

The significance of an individual book is a frequent puzzle. A characteristic example occurs in Elizabeth Daly’s The Book of the Dead (1946), where a young lady approaches Henry Gamadge with a copy of Shakespeare lent from the library of a man she cannot trace. Passages in The Tempest are marked (including ‘Burn but his books’), causing Gamadge to suspect that something unpleasant may have happened. The young lady is promptly murdered, and an attempt is made on Gamadge’s life; he locks himself in his library. The murder is solved, and the result turns upside down everything that has gone before. In Nothing Can Rescue Me (1943) Gamadge visits a country house. The wife is writing a novel, but an unknown person has added threatening comments which Gamadge identifies as quotations taken from books in the library, including Edgar Allan Poe and George Herbert. Gamadge finds the owner dead from a blow from a statuette. A literary puzzle. Is the murderer insane? In The Book of the Crime (1951), a husband reacts furiously when he comes across his wife in the library, dusting two particular books. Gamadge works out that they both concern the Tichborne case. Can the husband have a related dark secret, such as impersonation with a view to defraud?

In the short story ‘The Dragon’s Head’ (1926), Lord Peter Wimsey encourages his ten-year-old nephew to purchase antiquarian books (his public-school classmates only collect stamps), and he buys an unspecified edition of Sebastian Münster’s Cosmographia Universalis. When a strange visitor and burglars call, Wimsey suspects there is more to the volume than meets his monocle. An illustration turns out to be a map indicating buried treasure, which they promptly retrieve.⁴⁹

In these last few examples, the books themselves reveal the truth; these material artefacts do not lie, unlike many of their owners, but they often involve literary games. It can be the materiality of the book, irrespective of content, which provides a clue. A short story involving what lurks behind books is ‘The Doom of the Darnaways’ (1930) featuring G. K. Chesterton’s Father Brown. He notices in their family library the spine titles of books on Pope Joan, Iceland and the religion of Frederick …; Brown guesses that must be Frederick the Great. He also realises that the titles are fake. The (late) Lord Darnaway had invented fake books to disguise a hidden staircase, a priest’s hole, leading to another room, where his murdered body is found.⁵⁰

To an Oxford-educated academic such as J. I. M. Stewart (Michel Innes), a lecturer in English literature, latterly at Christ Church, Oxford, who wrote on Shakespeare (his second Inspector John Appleby book was Hamlet, Revenge!), the library was an obvious location for novels in which the police detective is not only educated and intelligent but enjoys a sense of humour. As Innes wrote: ‘Detective stories are purely recreational reading, after all, and needn’t scorn the ambition to amuse as well as puzzle.’⁵¹ Appleby’s scholarly knowledge of old books stems, according to Julian Symons, from high spirits.⁵² But there is a serious level, and Death at the President’s Lodging (1936) inhabits a disturbing world in which the borderline between sanity and insanity is slim.⁵³ When the president of an Oxbridge-type college is shot dead, Appleby carefully examines the library where the body is found. About 9,000 books are contained in the bookcases which clothe the room and at one end jut forward to form four shallow bays. In three bays are revolving bookcases containing the Dictionary of National Biography, the New English Dictionary and the Argentorati Athenaeus in fourteen bulky volumes (presumably the 1801–7 Strasbourg edition).

‘The Deipnosophists’, Appleby was murmuring; ‘Schweighäuser’s edition … takes up a lot of room … Dindorf’s compacter – and there he is.’ He pointed to the corner of the lower shelf where the same enormous miscellany stood compressed into the three compact editions of the Leipsic edition. [Inspector] Dodd, somewhat nonplussed before this classical abracadabra, growled suspiciously: ‘These last three are upside down – is that what you mean?’⁵⁴

Would careful book owners shelve books upside down? Would Poirot?⁵⁵ Dodd suspects a classical joke but Appleby points to a mark of grease, suggesting an amateur burglar with a candle. Dodd puts his hand behind a row of books (actually dummies) and pulls a concealed lever to reveal a small steel safe with a combination lock. Policemen had already pushed the books back on every shelf to discover whether a weapon had been concealed. Appleby contemplates ‘hundreds of heavy folios on the lower shelves’ which causes him to posit a theory that the president committed suicide by hollowing out a book to conceal an automatic, shoots himself, and returns the book to its shelf before collapsing on the floor.

Dodd glances ‘with new curiosity … at the vellum and buckram and morocco rows, gleaming, gilt-tooled, dull, polished, stained – the representative backs of perhaps four centuries of bookbinding’. But it is murder, and there are bones (Appleby ‘picked up a fibula … and wagged it with professionally excusable callousness at Dodd’). The dummy shelf contains the backs of fifty volumes of the British Essayists with the last ten in the wrong order. Reading the volume numbers of these fake books in reverse reveals the combination of the safe.⁵⁶

Appleby feloniously enters a suspect’s rooms to examine his books:

It was a severe library … Ancient philosophy, massed together. Modern philosophy, similarly massed. The International Library of Psychology, Philosophy, and Scientific Method – uniform, complete, overwhelming. Academic psychology – what looked like a first-class collection. Medical psychology – a great deal of this, too. General medicine – something like the nucleus of a consultant’s library. Criminal psychology. Straight criminology … And that was all.⁵⁷

Criminology is a popular topic in the private library in crime fiction. Appleby realises that the death is a literary construct, and he and Dodd perceive the crime in terms of a Sherlock Holmes or Edgar Allan Poe mystery, with allusions to other works such as the Bible. Detection of a crime is subordinated to Innes’s playful desire to create a literary puzzle, informed by the books in the library.⁵⁸

In The Long Farewell (1958), another library owner has been shot. Eighteenth-century owners

had doubtless here surveyed with complacency their undisturbed rows of handsomely tooled and gilded leather. There was still a mass of stuff to delight any authentic student of bibliopegy who should be set browsing in the place … But in addition to being the sort of library that many country houses can show, this room was also the workshop of a scholar.⁵⁹

‘There was a smell of leather.’ Appleby contends with a professor who believes he is an expert on bibliopegy, the study of bookbinding. As the latter remarks, the ‘history of bookbinding is a trivial sort of lore, after all. An amusement for collectors, sir.’⁶⁰ The plot involves a missing book with marginalia, Cinthio’s Ecatommiti (1565), a genuine source for Shakespeare; this copy is a forgery.

Innes’s Operation Pax (1951; published in America as The Paper Thunderbolt) is set largely in the Bodleian Library, though Innes denied knowledge of underground passages where the denouement takes place. Appleby’s sister, Jane, consults a tome in the Upper Reading Room, unfrequented by scholars (who are confined in Duke Humfrey’s) or undergraduates (too many stairs). The library appeals to her auditory and olfactory senses, bringing the heroine close to the detective and the alert reader in the use of all her senses:

But she came, too, for the smell of old leather and vellum and wood that permeated the approaches to the place; for the sound, strangely magnified in the stillness, of a fly buzzing on a window-pane, or for the muted clanking of the Emett-like contrivance which, behind the scenes, drew its continuously moving train of books up through secular darkness from crepuscular repositories below. She came, in short … for atmosphere.⁶¹

An odd man is chased around the catalogue shelves, ‘a sort of hide-and-seek round this monumental guide to universal knowledge’. The Bodleian was the epitome of the universal library. Minutes later, the man is found lying in the street and being transferred to an ambulance; the doctor is a fake.

The plot involves deaths, with clues inside books which involves Jane burglariously entering the Bodleian after dark to find two titles. There are a lot of books to search, but she finds her quarry, only to have a book snatched away by her lover who falls to his death, ‘plunging down through a million books, rank upon rank of books, armies of unalterable law’. There really is a body in the library. Once again, Appleby is confronted by the possibility of insanity, while the author amuses with a bibliographical puzzle. And there is the smell of leather.

The Bodleian makes brief appearances in Sayers’s Gaudy Night (1935) where one impression is uppermost in Harriet Vane’s mind: ‘Mornings in Bodley, drowsing among the worn browns and tarnished gilding of Duke Humphrey, snuffing the faint, musty odour of slowly perishing leather.’⁶² That odour of leather is an abiding memory of library users in crime novels. No murders occur, just a series of silly pranks, though a book is found burning in a grate. But the just-erected New Library of Vane’s college does feature. Before its official opening, books and shelves are tipped on the floor, but there is time to restore the room. Not all appreciate the library, and Annie, a servant, remarks to Harriet Vane:

‘It’s a very handsome room, isn’t it, madam? But it seems a great shame to keep up this big place just for women to study books in. I can’t see what girls want with books. Books won’t teach them to be good wives.’

‘What dreadful opinions!’, said Harriet.⁶³

Sayers’s lower-class characters tend to be stereotypes, but her scholarly background make her references to libraries sympathetic.

The name of the prolific Edgar Wallace is indelibly associated with violence and gore, but The Door with Seven Locks (1926) is surprisingly different because it is a tale of love. Young detective Dick Martin is retiring from Scotland Yard with an inheritance but is asked to solve the theft of books from the Bellingham Library in London. This little-known institution (based on the London Library) was founded in the eighteenth century to provide scientific books not easily found elsewhere. ‘No novel or volume of sparkling reminiscence has a place on the shelves of this institution.’ Here, as in Innes’s Bodleian, there is the smell of old leather. Luckily for the detective, the founder specified that the library should employ ‘two intelligent females, preferably in indigent circumstances’.⁶⁴

Dick recovers the missing tome from a mad scientist who does not understand the workings of a subscription library (namely, that borrowers should subscribe before borrowing) and restores the volume to one of those females with whom he has fallen in love, as happens to lady librarians. ‘What is the social position of a detective?’, the librarian asks her mother. ‘About the same as a librarian, my dear’, comes the reply. Privately, he investigates the disappearance of one of her relatives which involves the mad scientist. The love story is interrupted by murders, including one in a country house library, though bibliographical details are lacking. The villains die unpleasantly, while the detective and his young lady live happily ever after.⁶⁵ The heroine is a stereotypical female librarian (though she does not wear spectacles), but the library setting raises this pulp novel to a higher tone.

The library is a place of both concealment and drama; the books are (almost) irrelevant, but the location is what matters. In Robert Barr’s ‘Lord Chizelrigg’s Missing Fortune’ – part of his collection of spoof Sherlock Holmes stories The Triumphs of Eugène Valmont (1906) – a revised will is left between the pages of a book in the eccentric lord’s library, which also possesses a forge and anvil. But which book? The library is acting as an instrument of concealment, and the safe is hidden behind a bookcase. A concealed safe appears in The Black Stage (1945) by Anthony Gilbert (pseudonym of Lucy Malleson), where a country house is disturbed at midnight by noises emanating from the library. Books are lying around which had previously hidden the location of a safe in which the diamonds were kept. ‘Burglars aren’t readers as a rule’, says one character. ‘They’ll look behind pictures, but not much behind books.’ Another character borrows a volume of Hakluyt’s Travels for its adventure stories. The diamonds are missing, the lights suddenly go out, a shot is fired, and the body of a visitor is found on the library floor.⁶⁶

The importance of libraries and the printed word is found in several of Christie’s short stories. In ‘The Strange Case of Sir Arthur Carmichael’ (1933), Dr Carstairs stays in a country house to observe Sir Arthur, a young man in a poor mental state who only drinks milk and chases mice. Carstairs dreams that a cat beckons him to the library and points to a shelf of books. On awakening, a book is missing. After a shock, Sir Arthur reveals he had been dreaming he was a cat. There is a death, and the missing book turns out to be about whether a person can transform into an animal. This is one of Christie’s creepy psychological tales, and another such story involves a different kind of printed material. In ‘Philomel Cottage’ (1924) a new wife discovers, in a drawer locked by her husband, press cuttings showing an old photograph of a serial killer who had escaped from jail; it looks remarkably like her husband.⁶⁷

Murders in libraries often occur in Christie’s short stories with little detail as regards the library, as in ‘The Love Detectives’ (1950) and ‘The King of Clubs’ (1923). The Seven Dials Mystery (1929) includes pistol shots in the library during the night; a masterpiece of confusion.⁶⁸ But in ‘Three Blind Mice’ (1948), Christie achieved her apogee. Monkswell Manor was a guest house with a wireless in the library and a log fire:

Mrs. Boyle, in the library, turned the knobs of the radio with some irritation.… Twirling impatiently, she was informed by a cultured voice: ‘The psychology of fear must be thoroughly understood. Say you are alone in a room. A door opens softly behind you – ’

A door did open.…

The belt of the raincoat slid round her neck so quickly that she hardly realized its significance. The knob of the radio amplifier was turned higher.⁶⁹

The library has ceased to be a place in which to linger, the opposite of ‘cosy’. Whatever theories academics might concoct, it is Christie’s gift of evoking unanticipated horror that made her popular. This story epitomises the archetypal ‘body in the library’. It is sheer terror, presented far more convincingly than by any of her contemporaries. Christie knew what her readers demanded. In the world of Golden Age detective fiction, a dead body on the floor can only enhance a library, and Christie took an old and frequently used formula to a higher level. Books, individually, and en masse, both provide clues and obfuscate in the desire to read people and deeds. Senses are heightened through the smell of old leather, surely the ‘correct’ and expected odour of the traditional country house library. The reader both identifies with the familiarity of books and libraries per se, while remaining gloriously secure that the upper middle-class or institutional accumulation is comfortingly distant.