On October 22, I was honored and delighted to speak at the 2024 Bergen County Cooperative Library System’s Friends scholarship fundraiser. Murder in libraries and librarian-sleuths seemed a perfect match for the audience.
Here are three terrific mysteries in which a body turns up in a library.
1) If you like your mysteries good and creepy, try last year’s How Can I Help You by Laura Sims. Margo, the friendly library assistant, has a secret or two that just may have you wondering about the smiling, helpful person behind the counter in your local library.
2) If your tastes run to twisty stories-within-a-story meta-narratives, Sulari Gentill’s The Woman in the Library, published in 2022, is the book for you. It opens with a bang: a woman’s scream pierces the quiet of the Boston Public Library, and the book’s narrator tells us that one of the patrons sitting at her table will turn out to be a murderer.
3) The Golden Age of Mystery classic in which a body turns up in a private library is Agatha Christie’s The Body in the Library. It’s Christie’s second Miss Marple novel, first published in 1942, and its plot is fiendishly clever. And if forced to choose between Christie sleuths, I’m definitely “team Miss Marple,” much as I enjoy the eccentric little Belgian, Hercule Poirot.
These librarian-sleuth series represent three mystery styles: historical, cozy, and classic crime.
1. Seneca Falls Inheritance, by Miriam Grace Monfredo, is the first in a six-book historical mystery series set in America in the decades leading up to the Civil War. I love how the historical setting and the plot weave together in this first book. It’s Seneca Falls, NY, in 1848, the year and locale of the famous Women’s Rights Convention. The professional frustrations of librarian-sleuth Glynis Tryon and the murder itself are tied into the question of women’s rights.
2. The Bodies in the Library, by Marty Wingate, is the first of three cozy mysteries featuring Haley Burke, curator of a library dedicated to Golden Age of Mystery first editions. When Haley finds a corpse on the carpet, she suspects the killer had Christie’s The Body in the Library in mind. Now, all good cozys should have a cat if they can. In this one, he’s named “Bunter” after Lord Peter Wimsey’s manservant. And the cat helps catch the killer. As a bonus, the series is set in Bath, possibly England’s most charming city.
3. Murder At The 42nd Street Library by Con Lehane also begins with a bang when the victim is shot in the special collections section of New York’s flagship library. This is a grittier, classic crime novel with a nicely complicated librarian sleuth. Raymond Ambler is the curator of a fictional special collection of mystery books. For purists, the plot may include too many coincidences, but one of them allows the story to end on a note of grace, so I’m not complaining. The series has five books; the latest is Murder at the College Library, published this year.
Edith Wharton once said that every good mystery should produce “the thrill of the shudder.” Whatever its setting, I hope the next murder mystery you read does just that.
Comments