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The notion of finding “a body in the library” of a country house was another trope of the genre. Christie had fun with it in The Body in the Library, where the corpse is found in Gossington Hall, owned by Miss Marple’s cronies, Colonel Arthur Bantry and his wife Dolly. But profound changes were taking place in British society as war was followed by peace-time austerity, and high taxes made it impossible for many families to cling on to old houses that were cripplingly expensive to run. Country house parties fell out of fashion, and although traditional whodunits continued to be written and enjoyed, detective novelists could not altogether ignore the reality. The scale of upheaval is apparent in another Marple story, The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side, published twenty years after The Body in the Library. Gossington Hall has been sold off, and been run as a guest house, divided into flats, bought by a government body, and finally snapped up for use as a rich woman’s playground by a much-married film star. Her entourage provides a “closed circle” of suspects suited to the Sixties.
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