A young woman with bleached blonde hair, loud make up and a cheap satin evening dress has been placed in the most traditional library in St. Bantry greeted on an unremarkable morning by their maid’s agitated words, “…there’s a body in the library.” (pg. But I can think of at least two Christie novels (The Clocks and Halloween Party) where children behave this way. When Peter found the fingernail, I couldn't help thinking that in today's media, if a child did have something like that, they might conceivably show it off to their friends, but they would never casually show it off to the police, and if they did, the police would nab it and have forensic scientists all over it. And as a schoolteacher, I find it hard to imagine a student of mine, if they were involved in a murder case, no matter how distantly. There are, of course, novels for children that show children behaving like detectives (the Encyclopedia Brown books, for instance, or Harriet the Spy) but those books are intended for children and rarely show children intervening in a genuine police murder investigation. In American literature, you rarely see children being comfortable with, or interested in, police work. I also notice in this book that we see Christie depict children, especially boys, like 9 year old Peter Carmody, as being fascinated with murders and police work and interested in finding clues to solving murders that they are distantly involved in.
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