Hotel guest Conway Jefferson reports Ruby Keene, an 18-year-old dancer at the Majestic Hotel in Danemouth, as missing. She shares these observations with Dolly. Miss Marple notices that the appearance of this girl is not right, from her bitten fingernails to her old dress. Haydock’s autopsy reveals that the young woman, healthy but not fully mature, died between 10 pm and 12 midnight the previous evening, had been drugged and then strangled, and was not sexually molested. Trying to identify this dead young woman, Melchett heads to the nearby cottage of Basil Blake, but Blake's girlfriend Dinah Lee, a platinum blonde, is very much alive and arrives at the house while Melchett is interviewing Blake. The police investigators include Colonel Melchett and Inspector Slack. Bantry calls Miss Marple, (an old friend of hers). The colonel then contacts the police and Mrs. She had been painted with heavy makeup, platinum-blonde hair, and a silver-spangled dress. He finds the dead body of a young woman on the hearth rug in the library. Dolly Bantry then wakes her husband, Colonel Arthur Bantry to go downstairs.

Bantry, “There is a body in the library!” she cries. The novel features her fictional amateur detective, Miss Marple.

The US edition retailed at $2.00 and the UK edition at seven shillings and sixpence. Got to spend a bit in advertisement, of course.The Body in the Library is a work of detective fiction by Agatha Christie and first published in the US by Dodd, Mead and Company in February 1942 and in the UK by the Collins Crime Club in May of the same year. “No wonder the people who turn out these creams and messes make a fortune.” “Easy money, that’s what it is,” said Slack. They do exhibition dances, and one night it’s a tango and the next a crinoline Victorian dance and then a kind of Apache dance and then just ordinary ballroom, and, of course, the makeup varies a good bit.” “Good lord!” said the Colonel. But these professional girls, they have to ring a change, so to speak. They know what suits them and they keep to it. “In private life, sir, so to speak, a lady keeps to one or two distinct shades, one for evening, one for day. “Do you mean to say,” he murmured feebly, “that women use all these things?” Inspector Slack, who always knew everything, kindly enlightened him. Bottles of lotions-astringent, tonic, soothing, etc. Eyelash black, mascara, blue stain for under the eyes, at least twelve different shades of nail varnish, face tissues, bits of cotton wool, dirty powder-puffs. Hair lotions and “brightening” applications. An untidy heap of every variety of lipstick. Rows of jars of face cream, cleansing cream, vanishing cream, skin-feeding cream! Boxes of different shades of powder. “Colonel Melchett silently marvelled at the amount of aids to beauty that women could use.

Marple the body in the library