Guy Cuthbertson

Christie doesn't tell us very much, so we have to use our imaginations.

This is all part of the power of detective fiction.

We need to fill in the gaps.

Reading detective fiction inevitably reveals things about the reader too.

We might not have much desire to imagine Caleb and the schoolmistress, but we would need to imagine what the letter said.

Sometimes the story introduces the possibility that sex is important, but then persuades us that it is not an issue.

Take the body in the library.

The young woman on the floor, we are told, was Virgo Intacta, by the way.

With the Virgo Intacta, the Latin serving as another kind of euphemism, we are told not to consider the victim's sex life.

It is not quite that simple in that case, though.

Sex is repeatedly introduced, then taken away.

We are told that there are men who commit sexual crimes and, oh yes, there are such cases.

but we've no knowledge of anyone of that kind operating in this neighbourhood.

But the body in the library is a risque book in its own way.

Chapter one begins with the vicar's wife in a bathing costume and ends with the blonde sunbathing in shorts and a brassiere.

Like Lawrence's, the Marple stories are full of bodies, one way or another, and they get a lot of attention.

Christie likes the comic contrast between the setting and the goings on within it.

So in The Moving Finger we are told somehow one didn't expect that kind of thing in the placid backwater of Limstock.

Lady Chatterley's Lover plays a similar game in fact.

We don't expect a country house novel set in the English countryside to be full of passionate descriptions of sex between Connie Chatterley and Mellors.