Ngaio Marsh - Light Thickens

This is the last of Marsh's books, published in 1982, and we're back in the Dolphin Theatre where Peregrine Jay is producing Macbeth. 

I've never actually seen Macbeth, but it's one of those cultural phenomena that it's impossible not to pick up a lot of information about from other sources. In my case that was primarily from Blackadder - both the ghost and the three witches are referenced in the first program of the first series (in 1983, when I was ten) - and later, in the 90s, when Pratchett inverted it for Wyrd Sisters. 

Off the top of my head Agatha Christie also mentions Macbeth at least three times:

In Sparkling Cyanide when Tony is speaking to Race: 'Ah but what Macbeth saw really was a ghost! It wasn't a ham actor wearing Banquo's duds! I'm prepared to admit that a real ghost might bring it's own atmosphere from another world.'

In By the Pricking of my Thumbs (which title is taken from the play) when Tuppence quotes it and then goes on to propound her theory that Lady Macbeth egged Macbeth on because she was bored, and incidentally (I paraphrase) particularly bored of Macbeth.  

And again in The Pale Horse when the three witches are discussed and someone (I forget who) suggests that more effective casting than the usual prancing around and in your face evil would be to have three old women just looking slyly at one another. That the very banality of evil somehow makes it more disturbing. 

I don't know if theatrical fashion ever swung that way - The Pale Horse was written in 1961 - but if it did I think it must have swung back again by the time Marsh is writing. Her witches are every inch in your face. Choreographed to leap off gibbets and leer malevolently. 

In fact sometimes in this book it seems as if this whole play is not being so much acted as danced. The fight scene in particular is laboriously choreographed, but many other scenes are rehearsed so often and Jay's vision for the whole thing explained so thoroughly that the reader (this reader anyway) is left with a real hope that all this dreary repetition is relevant.   

Not that there aren't moments of tension. Someone starts leaving the most frightening props - the false severed heads - in places designed to startle and scare. Macbeth and Macduff don't get on, which is particularly concerning given that fight scene. Certain members of the cast have secrets and others are strong believers in the Macbeth curse (which again I think I first learnt of via Blackadder. This time in series 3, in 1987). But these interesting details seem lost in a sea of stage direction and visits to the pub and drives up and down the Embankment (something very much of the time I think. Twenty years before when we first met Jay, even quite well off people walked, and if it was dark or the weather was bad they took taxis. By 82 they drive everywhere.)

Anyway, after the murder, things click into place. The pace either accelerates or appears to. Alleyn investigates. Fox turns up. Secrets are revealed. Jay's sons, who seemed an irrelevance on first appearance, become more rounded - yet without turning into tiresome miniature adults. Emily, Jay's wife, shows signs of still having a personality beyond feeding him, and we are reminded she is also of the theatre.

Macbeth will close of course, but the Dolphin (under the bequest of the late Mr Conducis) carries on, as immortal as Alleyn. 

Which wraps up this challenge. I'm not going to end with an analysis of whether Marsh deserved her title of one of the Queens of Golden Age Detective Fiction. It seems obvious to me she did. People went on reading her books through five decades, and it's not hard to see why. 

I am tempted to start a Margery Allingham or Gladys Mitchell challenge next, but not until I get the 80s out of the way..

Ngaio Marsh - Grave Mistake and Photo Finish

Grave Mistake

I hesitated over including Grave Mistake in my Marsh reread. Partly because I've read it within the last couple of years – in fact its one of those which started me off on the reread in the first place - and partly because I found it (as I think I've described it before) a nice workmanlike job that didn't really stand out in any way.

It still doesn’t. There are some interesting characters – the ‘daily’ Mrs Jobbins, the wealthy Mr Markos and his son – and a scattering of curious motives that never feel fully explored. 

Something else that’s been creeping up but I’ve only just noticed is that the books seem rather more police procedural by this stage. Alleyn starts his career in the 30s as a gentleman ‘tec. A police officer yes, but one with much in common with other ‘great detectives’. 

That has gradually faded out by this point. Although people still react with surprise to his social class, Alleyn is a well respected chief superintendent very much embedded in the force and the way they do things. There are no brilliant flashes of insight. Just solid, plodding, work. Whether that is a reflection of the kind of books Marsh wanted to write, or the kind of books people wanted to read by the late 70s when Grave Mistake was published, I’m not sure.

 

Photo-Finish

In photo-finish we’re just on the cusp of the 80s. Brilliant opera star Isabella Sommita is being persecuted by a paparazzo who is following her around the world taking – in fact orchestrating – the most unflattering pictures they can, and then selling them for a small fortune.

At the same time La Sommita has taken on (both musically and as a lover) a young and handsome musician who has written an opera she thinks is wonderful, but anyone with any musical sense (including, with a sudden thud down to earth, the young man himself) knows is a dud.

Troy and Alleyn fetch up at the scene in the semi plausible fashion they sometimes do – Scotland Yard is curious about La Sommita’s activities, Troy has a commission to paint her.

Incidentally there is a repetition in this book of someone suggesting to Alleyn (as more than one person did in Black as He’s Painted’) that he should ‘put his foot down’ about Troy’s work if he’s not comfortable with the situation. He has to explain why he doesn’t in a way he never had to in earlier works. Crime fiction (or at least the stuff still available) was seemingly more sexist in the 70s than it was in the 40s. It’s perhaps a reflection of the kind of crime being written – supposedly more realistic and hardboiled – but still very strange to stumble across in the same author. 

There is also a moment when Alleyn mentions male chauvinism but confesses he’s never sure what women mean by that, apparently unconscious that his boss telling him to lay down the law to his wife would be an prime example.

Again I kind of did and didn't enjoy this. It was ok. It didn't sparkle like her earlier work, and maybe wasn't meant to.

Ngaio Marsh - Black as He's Painted and Last Ditch

There is something strangely dated about Black as He's Painted - not dated to the 70s, when it was written, but dated to an earlier era. We have live-in servants for a start, a husband and wife team who 'oblige' for a few of the neighbours but essentially come with the nice little house Mr Whipplestone has impulsively bought upon retirement. 

Mr Whipplestone is also redolent of an earlier era, as is his nice little house and the Mews it sits in, and his charming cat. 

Other things are very 70s - I don't think anyone now would write the character of the president of the newly independent African state of Ng'ombwana (Marsh sensibly avoided using a real place) quite the way he's written here. It's definitely a bit othering, but at the same time it's quite snobby, in the sense that he went to the same illustrious public school as Roderick Alleyn, and is repeatedly referred to in the narrative by his childhood nickname 'The Boomer'. 

So of course it's poor Alleyn who the FO and Scotland Yard send out to Ng'ombwana to try and persuade the president to be careful of himself on his up and coming visit to Britain. 

Off Alleyn obediently if grumpily goes, horribly self conscious about the whole thing, as well he might be, and secures the promise, although the president is still insistent that despite previous attempts to kill him his people must see that he is not scared. 

Meanwhile in the Mews just a stone's throw away Mr Whipplestone tries to rack his brains about where he's seen some of his neighbours before, realising (after a chat with Alleyn, who he just happens to know) that it was back in Ng'ombwana where he worked under British rule..

Did I guess whodunnit? Yes and no. Mostly no.  What I mostly enjoyed though was the slice of a particular point in time, and poor Alleyn tying himself in knots trying to be both tactful and actually do his job, and the president, ultimately, running rings around him. 

Last Ditch is a completely different affair. A young, pregnant, unmarried woman provides our corpse, taking a dangerous jump over a hedge despite her uncle (who raised her) telling her not to. 

The police work around that is all solid, and young Ricky Alleyn's friendship with the people who hired horses that day also works. They know his parents (Roderick and Troy, of course) and so that puts him on the spot as one of the people to find the body and notice a few things that the police are going to notice too. 

Then somehow, it all falls to bits. Firstly Ricky repeatedly makes a fool of himself, blundering about into trouble like one of those stupid damsels who exist just to make a muck of things and end up tied to a chair in a basement with water running in. 

He also falls in love with a married woman and kisses her (or tries to kiss her) at one point with absolutely zero encouragement that I can see. 

She feels sorry for him, probably because he seems to be emotionally about fourteen but is holidaying by himself and writing a book so presumably is 21 or over. 

His relationship with his dad is quite sweet, but goodness, no wonder they want to keep him away from police work.

Ngaio Marsh - Tied up in Tinsel

Tied up in Tinsel is, I think, the only Christmas book by Marsh (I had to go back and check Death and the Dancing Footman, published thirty years before, but although in the earlier book there is a winter party in a country house, with the requisite cut-off-by-snow complication, it's early 1940, rather than Christmas).

This book starts with Hilary Bill-Tasman, who I pegged as middle-aged at first but gradually realised was meant to be younger, restoring his ancestral home with the money from a surprisingly successful antiques business built up by his late father (who had all the right connections) and honorary uncle Bert Smith (who had the business brain). 

The bulldozers are slumbering under the snow at present though, and as with the earlier book a house party is in the offing, and a portrait by that famous, if fictional, artist Agatha Alleyn nee Troy is underway. To add to the fun there will be a big children's party for the local families, complete with food, presents and a golden bearded druid (in lieu of Father Christmas). 

Of course you can't run all this sort of thing without servants, but in 1973 servants are not easy to come by. Hilary gets round this problem by employing what Inspector Fox later calls 'oncers' - convicted murderers who committed their crimes under peculiar circumstances, have served their sentences, and are considered highly unlikely to do it again. Most luckily there is a prison just over the next scarecrow-topped hill, and they are quite happy to send the odd person Hilary's way in hope of rehabilitation. 

Which is a mad but somehow quite plausible set-up, the sort of thing you can imagine people doing, in that hopeful 'liberal with a small l' 1970s way, and fits tidily with Alleyn and Troy's earlier professed distaste for the death penalty (which was abolished for murder, although not treason, in the 60s). 

But of course once someone goes missing no-one can quite forget that there are people in the house who have killed before.. 

I'm a bit sorry I didn't read this one at Christmas, because although I didn't really care whodunnit and the solution to the mystery was fairly straightforward, it does have that perfect Christmas atmosphere - eccentric family members, lots of food and drink, snow sculptures and sleigh bells and, of course, lots of tinsel. Hilary is one of those fairly harmless snobs Marsh excels in, and Troy's confused reactions to the ex-murderous staff (trying to think the best but unable to stop the intrusive thoughts about what they have actually done) is excellent. 

I might read it again at Christmas anyway. Especially as if seems - fingers crossed - I'm on track to read all the books by the end of the year.. 

Which means I need a new project for 2021. Back to the 80s again, maybe? 

Ngaio Marsh - When in Rome

I meant to write about When In Rome back when I read it in September, and I'm not quite sure why I didn't. 

In this one we have Alleyn taking a holiday tour of Rome, and like Clutch of Constables before it you can feel that time has passed, but not at the same pace for the Alleyns themselves as for the rest of the world. In particular there is an aunt and nephew combo who clearly think they're very vicious and 'with it' (we're in the late 60s) but who are just rather pathetic in a way, and perhaps even realise it. Others on or around the tour are: a decently famous author, enveigled into being a guide against his better judgement, a young and slightly star struck young woman from his publishing house (they're not together, she just happens to be there, but they provide the romance that is so often a prerequisite of murder mysteries) a deeply unpleasant blackmailer, his ex wife who is now reduced to begging, and a married couple from, I think, Holland (whose accents were thankfully not too overused as light relief).  I'm sure I've missed some people, but those are the main ones that I remember. 

The ending is slightly cinematic - it would film better than it reads and I do wonder whether (and I've wondered the same about some Agatha Christies from the same sort of period - Hallowe'en Party in particular) the dramatic but tidy ending was just how it was done in the 60s. 

But the ending is a minor point in a book I really enjoyed. Right from the first, with our author's panic when he realises he's lost his manuscript and doesn't even know how to tell anyone, then his creeping realisation of what's really going on, it drew me in. It all felt very real.

So all in all, loved this one. More so than the first time I read it actually, and I really want to go back to Rome. 

Maybe next year. 

Ngaio Marsh: Clutch of Constables

One of the interesting things about reading a series in order for the first time is seeing groups of books together in ways you might not have previously noticed. I had never noticed, for example, that first Troy and then Alleyn are on holiday alone in a small group of strangers in two consecutive books - although the other spouse is always in the wings somewhere, being written to, and an explanation given for why their son Ricky is not with Troy in the first one when she decides to take an impromptu canal tour of the waterways. 

And promptly falls down a kind of rabbit-hole into the middle of something strange and unpleasant which she gets flashes of but doesn't really understand. Something that could be easily dismissed as fancy if it weren't interleaved with a lecture Alleyn is giving to students at a much later date, describing the case in hindsight. 

And yet.. I didn't find it gelled. That lecture only interrupts the flow, and I was deeply disbelieving of so many people's actions and motivations. My first issue is that the Troy of the earlier books is not a person of great instinct. She is a great observer of detail - in previous books she has noticed how full a handbag is at different stages of the evening, or how a young child spells grandfather, even before she had any reason to think it mattered - but that is not the same thing. Here we have something more like intuition, which I feel she has always distrusted before. 

Then there are the police stations she's calling into, whose officers essentially patronise her and yet tell her to go to the next police station when the boat arrives there, which is just plain inconsistent - if they're politely trying to put her off why do they keep asking her to drop in? Then make it sound as if she's the one insisting on seeing them? 

The actions of the murdered woman and the criminals though, are even more particularly ludicrous. 

Gap because there will be spoilers..........

Particularly bewildering things about the victim include: 

Why someone who thought they'd stumbled onto a crime would write it down, even if she was in the habit of writing things down, and then having done so and dropped her journal in the canal by accident, would attract attention to it and thus give someone a chance to look at it. 

Why she would sleep up on deck alone if she was worried.

Why she's been going round telling people she has a Fabergé necklace she always wears. 

Obvious answer to all the above is she's not very bright, which I can accept, although Marsh's portrayals of undersexed middle aged women being unattractive idiots are a tad too frequent for my liking, and sit somewhat strangely with the fact that two of the male occupants of the boat make a dead set for Troy despite the fact she must surely be 50 if not 60 by now. (I can sort of swallow her stepping into the same fountain of youth as her husband, but to have suddenly developed the same fatal attraction as him was a leap too far.) 

As for the crooks:

Why did they move the body the way they did and to where they did? i.e. somewhere on the boat's route back where she would be recognised if found? 

Why did they go ahead with the plan to plant their fake painting locally and use Troy as a witness, given they must have known by then who she was and that she was already suspicious? 

But most of all why are so many of them there - almost everyone on the boat - when that's not at all necessary for the job. Is it the annual works do? Can they claim it back on expenses? So many questions. 

Lastly, how much preparation did they actually do for this major piece of fraud? They didn't even know that the boat went back through the town after closing time and they'd have to take a bus back to plant their cache. 

And all this is meant to be orchestrated by (wait for it) the Jampot, a criminal mastermind who Alleyn is telling his students about however many years later but who should really be textbook example one of  'crooks who are not as clever as they think they are'.

Next time: When in Rome. 

Ngaio Marsh - Death at the Dolphin

My very favourite thing about this book is Peregrine Jay's love affair with the old Dolphin Theatre and his seizing what might be his only chance to persuade the owner not to pull it down but run it as a going concern. He gets his dream job of manager, seeing the marble polished and the bombed-out stage fixed and even writing the very first play. It's wonderful and improbable but somehow done with such sleight of hand and such joy you can't help believing in it anyway. 

And nothing - cantankerous actors with tangled love lives, a millionaire who seems slightly 'off', even the discovery of a priceless relic - really tops or undermines that for me. 

Of course ostensibly this is a murder story and true enough the murder is tragic and pointless - murder for gain that ultimately doesn't come off. But, like the other often fun supporting characters - Jay's antiques restorer friend, the child prodigy whose mother sees him as a meal ticket - or the sheer ridiculousness of the secret code to the safe being widely guessed at and yet still not changed even though Alleyn strongly recommends it - it's wasted here. Nothing can take the bloom off the history of the old Dolphin and it's glorious revival from blitzed out wreck to going concern. 

Next up is Clutch of Constables, which I seem to remember as mostly about Troy and a canal trip.

Also, as an aside - where is Bathgate?  It's interesting the demotion from the earliest books where we were looking in from his point of view - very Hastings, very Watson - to intersection with Alleyn because he's the busy journalist lucky enough to also be a friend, thumbing his nose at his rivals, and finally the odd letter and the war and a brief 'goodbye, Roderick's back soon' with Troy at one of the big London stations (Paddington, I think), and although he pops up in one more book he makes so little impression that this is how I always think of him, running down the platform waving goodbye to Troy, who will be the outsider point of view from now on, a relic of the jazz age and early books with their Bolshevist plots. 

Ngaio Marsh: Hand in Glove and Dead Water

Hand in Glove

Terrible but strangely likable snob Mr Pike Period (perhaps because his snobbery makes him vulnerable and slightly ridiculous) is in the habit of writing short but elaborate letters of condolence.

He has also recently started sharing a house with Harold Cartell, an old friend who has retired from the law. Cartell is also a snob in his way, declining to acknowledge his adoptive niece and refusing to release a little of the money his 24 year old stepson is coming into in six months anyway, purely because he doesn't want him to leave the guards and take up with arty types and 'beatniks'. (The book was published in 1962)

Unlike the last book I felt Marsh managed to have different kinds of people - servants, spivs and snobs - without making them too hopelessly ridiculous or stereotypical. There's an element of farce around Cartell's dog, who all the local male dogs fight over quite literally, and a more sinister element regarding the adoptive niece's boyfriend who may or may not be terrifying her into silence post murder, and then Mr Pyke Period wandering through this world being hopelessly unworldly and putting himself in danger, and somehow she weaves it together well.

I whizzed through this one and moved on to:

Dead Water

A young boy is cured of his warts the day after a beautiful lady at a local spring tells him to bathe his hands and believe.

Two years later the spring is a tourist trap, and the new owner of the island it's on (who just happens to be Roderick Alleyn's old French mistress) wants what she sees as a dangerous scam shut down, refusing even to profit by selling the island on.

With this threat to their newfound prosperity hanging over the locals and at least one person devastated by the challenge to what has become an article of faith for her, the attacks begin.

I loved the setting, and Alleyn's old French mistress. And both points of view were nicely balanced - the cruelty of offering false hope to disabled pilgrims, including a young mother with a baby that won't thrive, and then the human cost of all the investment going south and the fact that sometimes, presumably through a kind of faith healing, it does work.

My only complaint is that the first half is so good that I found the murder and subsequent investigation an unwelcome distraction. The moral issues and conflicts between people that Marsh sets up are often so interesting. I would have enjoyed having her tackle these conflicts for a bit longer, and perhaps seeing a resolution. Instead of the crime being solved but the reader left wondering 'But what happened next?'

Off With His Head - Ngaio Marsh

It took me a long time to read this one. The repeated descriptions of the Morris dancing and the written-as-spoke dialects did me in. It's really not necessary to have the German character say 'ach' and make a point of her sentence construction every time she speaks, and when a similar sort of thing is being done with the rural characters as well it becomes a major distraction away from what is being said.

Anyway it's a cruel sort of humour laughing at a middle-aged woman who is frightened of the police because of her experience of the Nazis (Alleyn's attitude to this is basically 'how tiresome') and even crueller to mock the 'simple' zummerzet bloke whose father and brothers terrorise him.

As a mystery it's perfectly good. Unfortunately fair play does mean going through the dancing repeatedly, and even though it's not the happy frivolous summer pub bells-and-morris but a darker, older, more fantastical kind, done in the bitter cold, with real swords, I got very fed up of the repetition. Perhaps for another reader the occult element would have built tension, but not for me. Then there's the probably-not-necessary re-enactment, either because Superintendent Alleyn simply loves them, or maybe because Marsh's readers expected them by now. Why change a formula which works?

But given that this one seems to have driven two people to the verge of a breakdown I'm amazed someone hasn't complained to the Home Office by now.

The next is Singing in the Shrouds, which I briefly reviewed in June 2018 here, so won't do again.

Then False Scent, which was one of the ones that started me on this challenge last year. That review is here.

So I'm going to skip straight ahead to Hand in Glove for next time.

Scales of Justice - Ngaio Marsh

I'm sure I've read this in the last ten years. I remembered the district nurse (and that I don’t think much of her taste in men) and the old lady who paints ineffectual watercolours despite her own strong personality. And that there’s a trout and an ongoing feud about fishing rights, but the mystery left me so cold I couldn't even remember the murderer. 

We start the book with Nurse Kettle (for that is her name) at the top of a hill looking down on a lovely little village thinking how every prospect pleases, but not finishing the quotation because she believes that here not even man is vile.

And then the inhabitants seem to spend the rest of the book trying to be unpleasant enough to prove her wrong.  Everyone from the supposedly penitent Sir Henry Lacklander, who has written his memoirs to confess to espionage, but is safely dead before they come out - thus leaving someone else to make the hard decision to publish and take the flak - to his widow, who tells Alleyn the truth only when she knows it’s already come out, to the second wife of the murder victim, about whom everyone is appallingly snobbish, but whose main offence seems to be her ‘manner’.  

Even the obligatory young couple in love seemed dreary and worthy. Maybe it’s the setting, maybe it’s that I can’t get excited about trout fishing, but I found this book especially slow. 

Opening Night - Ngaio Marsh

I remember being disappointed by Opening Night the first time I read it - it takes a long time to get to the actual murder, and there's any amount of theatre jargon and clashing personalities before then. I've tempered that slightly with my re-read. The piece of deduction that leads the police to conclude it wasn't suicide as first thought is pretty good, and the personalities are reasonably interesting, but the crime still feels like an incidental to the main story. In fact, as it closed I found myself pleased that it hadn't spoilt all these people's lives. Probably not even the run of the play.

So a good book, but not necessarily a good murder mystery.

Spinsters in Jeopardy was one of the books that set me reading (or in most cases re-reading) Marsh in order, less than a year ago, so I won't read it again. My thoughts can be seen on my earlier post here: https://brieferthanliteralstatement.blogspot.com/2019/04/ngaio-marsh.html. It's an oddly baroque confection, and sheer fluke that things didn't end up far worse for the Alleyns than they did.

This has been a odd post - I feel I want to say something about the current situation but can't imagine what I can possibly say that others haven't, so will leave it there. 

Swing, Brother, Swing - Ngaio Marsh

Not quite mad enough to be institutionalised, not quite sane enough for his family to be comfortable, Lord Pastern is a man of obsessions. His latest is playing drums in Breezy Bellairs’ swing band. 

Breezy, on the other hand, is an anxious peacemaker with, perhaps, an eye to the main chance while around him swirl problems and antagonisms.

Pastern’s step daughter Fee, for example, unofficially engaged to the accordionist (who is furious that she won’t announce it) while her mother tries to set her up with her cousin instead.

Or Breezy’s usual drummer (‘tympanist’), who has to step down to let Pastern do his stuff, and threatens to leave for another outfit. While Pastern deludes himself that Breezy is planning to let the man go and hire him instead, the band all know that Pastern just isn’t good enough, and his ideas about showmanship are pure ham..

And then farce turns to tragedy when the staged shooting of the accordionist ends in a real dead body..

Luckily Detective Chief Inspector Alleyn and Troy are sitting close by (although Troy doesn’t really come into this one. Nor does Bathgate, who pops up for copy and other reasons that I don’t quite recall. Fox is much more entertaining, quietly amusing himself ticking off the rank and file, or ordered home and then found in the servants quarters asking questions all friendly-like.) 

The puzzle is shades of Enter a Murderer, and I guessed whodunnit, but the mystery is pretty superfluous here, Marsh does a nice line in personalities, and Fox’s French practice and the patter of the band musicians is just enough to be entertaining and not so much as to be annoying.

9/10 for this one. 

Died in the Wool and Final Curtain - Ngaio Marsh

Died in the Wool

I actually read this quite a while back but wanted to re-read the next – Final Curtain – before I wrote about it as I didn’t feel I had much to say about Died in the Wool.

I still don’t. The setup is promising, with a dead body found bundled up tight in a bale of wool and the murderer having taken advantage of the fact that the victim – a busy female politician - was dashing off early next morning, so by the time her absence was noticed the wool would be (and was) loaded up and taken away; and a certain amount of interest in seeing how the victim was viewed by different people. But ultimately the book doesn’t know if it’s a spy thriller or a murder mystery, and never quite pulls together. 

Alleyn also clearly doesn’t want to be there (he’s been a long time away from home and his wife at this point) and the descriptions of New Zealand that were so evocative in Colour Scheme just don’t come off somehow.  

Final Curtain  

Sees Roderick Alleyn come home from war work. Troy has been doing pictoral surveys for the army and is (as her old friend Katti notes) even thinner and more tired than before. She has also been having treatment for a carbuncle on her hip – which I assume is some kind of growth that would now be sent for analysis as well as removed. Everything is rather subdued.

Nigel Bathgate - who I completely forgot was in this one - livens things up by inveigling Troy to paint a portrait of a retired actor in the few weeks before Alleyn comes back, writing a chatty epistle about the family which was quite entertaining but felt like a slightly heavy and unnecessary plot device. There is a beautiful member of the chorus who the old man proposes to marry, sending his family into conniptions (the conniptions seemed quite reasonable to me when I was younger. Now I'm inclined to agree with Caroline Able, whose school is billeted in the other part of the building, that it is all a bit pathological).

The house and the goings on are distinctly Gothic, but books on embalming clash with practical things like tins of food from America and petrol rations, and a series of practical jokes more childish than macabre. Both Alleyn and Troy worry that they will be strangers to one another and have to work their way back to some sort of partnership.

The world of Death in a White Tie is a million miles away. 

Death and the Dancing Footman and Colour Scheme

Death and the Dancing Footman

Aubrey Mandrake, playwright, is invited to a weekend party by his good friend Jonathan Eager who has deliberately invited antagonistic elements – people who’ve opened rival businesses or are having affairs – to his country house. In the hope, Eager says, of reconciling them.

Then they get snowed in and the phone line goes down, and we have all the best ingredients for a country house murder.

Somehow Marsh not only makes this credible and even makes Mr Eager a sympathetic character rather than Most Probable First Corpse. Mandrake also segues believably from being slightly precious and over sensitive to actually quite efficient once real disaster strikes, despite the club foot which bars him from war service. The atmosphere in the house gets increasingly but never ludicrously claustrophobic.

A very, very good example of the format.

Colour Scheme

By the mud baths and sulphurous pools at the New Zealand resort of Wai-ata-tapu, Colonel and Mrs Claire run a business something between a boarding house and a spa, although it seems their adult daughter, Barbara, actually does any work that isn’t done by their Maori servant, Huia; and their regular income is apparently provided by Mrs Claire’s incredibly cranky brother Dr Ackrington, who pays for the privilege of staying there so he can have the privilege of criticising their business sense too.

There is also a man called Maurice Questing staying at the place with an offensively proprietal attitude towards it, and it’s fairly obvious early on that the Colonel has borrowed money from him and now can’t pay him back. Meanwhile Dr Ackrington thinks Questing might be a spy – there have been signals from the peak of an extinct volcano at night, and a ship sunk offshore – and the local Maori people believe he is stealing artefacts from their burial ground. He also manages to make himself objectionable to Barbara and a famous actor who has come partly for the spa treatment and partly for the entertainment.

I did find this one dragged a bit. You can guess who the corpse is, just by how many motives are set up around the one character, and although the most interesting aspects of the story are the descriptions of the place and people, some people – particularly Colonel and Mrs Claire – just never came alive for me at all.

A Surfeit of Lampreys

This was one of my favourites before, and even now I’m more aware of how spoilt the ‘charming’ Lamprey family are I do still like them. The way they talk about their less attractive relations would be obnoxious if they were talking to a stranger, but within the family it doesn’t seem so bad. They are extravagant (cabs and food are somewhat lavish) and the father is clearly hopeless at earning and investments, but given that his brother’s money isn’t really his in the sense of having been earned - but family money, which he has through virtue of being the eldest son - you can see why the Lamprey’s might expect him to help out a bit. (He could, in my opinion, at the very least put his nephews and nieces through a good school and let his brother live in the family house in London, since he’s not using it himself.)

Also, and this is a point I don’t think I fully registered when I read Marsh’s books the first time, all these earlier ones are written during the Great Depression, when even qualified people struggled to get work and even previously healthy businesses went bust.

The story itself is downright strange, with gothic overtones and the outsider point of view of young Roberta Grey, whose parents have recently died and who has come over from New Zealand to ‘the old country’ and her old friends, the Lampreys, who lived in New Zealand for a spell to save money.

Part of the fun is seeing London through her eyes, all the way from the boat coming in at Tilbury, to taking the tube. The murder is horribly believable.

Death At the Bar - Ngaio Marsh

The set up for this murder is gorgeous, and now has me wondering how long and often Marsh stayed in Britain in the 30s (I'm hoping to read her autobiography to finish this project off, which will hopefully have some answers) and whether her memory was just that good or she took notes.

It also reminded me -in a way that the books with Troy don't, oddly - that Marsh was an artist as well as a writer. The cosy pub on the Cornish coast is beautifully painted in words, as is the setting, and of course it's a place people go for the light and also to paint pretty watercolours.

Then there is the gradual mingling of the different groups in the pub, the games of darts and buying of drinks, and finally the dramatic injury of a young man while a trick is being done, and his subsequent death by poison.

The frustrated landlord, driven mad by insinuations by one of his regulars that he is somehow to blame, shoots off to Scotland Yard. Alleyn writes a polite note to the local Super saying 'of course we wouldn't dream of interfering' and they write back and say 'Actually..'

My only quibble is that I wasn't convinced by the love interest aspect of the book at all. It's nicely set up but we never see the engaged couple much more than moderately friendly, so I wasn't really invested in who the girl ended up with. It just seemed tagged on.

Overture to Death - Ngaio Marsh

I’ve hit one of the ones I really didn’t enjoy. It starts with a fairly standard set up – son wants to marry a lovely girl, but father wants him to marry money to keep up the old family home that’s been theirs for generations. Sometimes I can sympathise with both sides in cases like this – here I found myself thinking the squire was mad. Why on earth would anyone just do what their ancestors did for another generation, and another, and another, and sacrifice all those lives to it. It’s just treading water, and going nowhere.

Then we met the other characters, who arrive at the house to plan a fundraiser. We soon find that the eldest two ladies (they're about 50 I think) are in love with the vicar, and the middle one is having an affair with the doctor, who has brought her along with an idea for a play the group can do. None of the women like each other, but they pretend to, purposely making things difficult under a mask of self-sacrifice. Done wittily and subtly this sort of thing can be quite funny, but here the reader is hit over the head with it and it’s at the level of neurosis.

Not that I think the psychology is implausible – there must have been plenty of women raised with the expectation of a family and a husband who found, after the First World War, that they’d be spending their lives not only not needed for that but not trained for anything else. They would also have been brought up in a world where their needs – especially their sexual desires – would have been considered secret and even shameful things. It’s a situation ripe for neurosis. But it could have been done much more sympathetically, and we have seen from previous books that Marsh is capable of that. It seems a shame she didn’t try it here.

The murder feels almost redundant – the air is already poisonous – and I have actually forgotten how Alleyn gets involved. Local police? Probably. Maybe the squire or the vicar.

The only remotely sympathetic figures are Dinah, the vicar’s daughter, who is also the person the squire’s son wants to marry, and the vicar – although he lost points for believing there is anything ‘wrong’ in his daughter's relationship when he knows those suggesting it are not even a little bit rational on the subject.

Alleyn investigates. Bathgate turns up, presumably just in case we’d forgotten him, and is made to sit in the corner and write what he's told. He's a husband and father at this point as well as a successful journo, so I'm susprised he tolerates it. Alleyn writes to Troy, presumably in case we'd forgotten her or thought they'd broken it off (and a lacklustre and self-deprecating little letter it is too).

Points because the method of murder seems ridiculous at first, but the explanation of why it happened like that works beautifully. 

Artists in Crime and Death in a White Tie

Artists in Crime by Ngaio Marsh

I’ve said in previous posts that Artists in Crime isn’t one of the gaps in my reading of Marsh. On the contrary, it’s one of the ones I’ve read repeatedly. Inspector Alleyn, on the boat back from New Zealand, disturbs the artist Agatha Troy whilst she is painting the wharf at Suva, and after a slightly rocky start a tentative friendship-slash-romance develops. 

(Incidentally those month-long sea voyages must have been very useful for meeting people, and an absolute nightmare if there was someone you particularly wanted to avoid. I can’t think of any comparable situation now where you would spend so much time out of your normal life with people you didn’t know. A long hospital stay perhaps, but even then you’d have visitors and your contact with other patients would be controlled.).

Again in this book the minor characters are a lot of fun. Inspector Fox meets Alleyn’s mother, as do we, and if she is just a little too perfect in some ways she’s agreeably dry in others.  The murder victim’s friend is a chorus girl called Bobbie O’Dawne who talks in a kind of stage patter, blasé about the facts of life, and yet palpably upset at news of the death of her friend. Troy’s good friend Katti Bostock is pugnacious without being aggressive and as for Troy’s art students - as friend Katti puts it in her letter - ‘I don't know whether it's struck you what a rum brew the class will be this term’. 

Our old friend Bathgate turns up as well but feels like a redundancy to be honest. He doesn’t mind. He's married his Angela and is moving on with his life.

Refreshingly, Alleyn’s stilted little romance with Troy is badly damaged by the investigation, despite that thing he does of assuming the woman he likes can’t possibly be the murderer (I can’t help thinking this should have come back to bite him at some point) and his mother’s immediate approval and assistance. 

Unfortunately I don’t know (literally can’t gauge) how well the book works as a mystery anymore - I remember it too well – but it still works on all the other levels.

Death in a White Tie

Blackmail in high society. Little Lord Robert Gospell, one of the nicest people imaginable, formerly of the FO, is helping Alleyn and Fox with their investigations. He’s just getting close (indeed he rings Alleyn to arrange a meeting to Tell Him All) when he gets killed.

  

Like Artists in Crime this book is very much more tolerant of the dark secrets people keep in their closets than Death in Ecstasy was. Gospell has one moment at the ball on the night he dies when he feels ‘as if an intruder had thrown open all the windows of this neat little world and let in a flood of uncompromising light..’ but he recognises it as a fit of the blues, not a judgement.

And again the minor characters are very good - better than Alleyn, to be honest, who has his affected moments and also occasions when he speechifies and then realises that is what he is doing and pulls himself up, and I don't quite believe in him. 

Still one of my favourites though. 

Vintage Murder - Ngaio Marsh

We're in the Antipodes for this one, and Inspector Alleyn, supposedly convalescing from an unspecified illness (although I can’t help noticing that his convalescence seems to consist of travelling halfway round the world, taking a long sea voyage by himself and following it up with a seat in a crowded overnight train. And this all before the murder has taken place, and he's forced to stay up until the wee small hours chatting and smoking with the local fuzz.) has fallen in with a touring theatre company. 

Unfortunately despite the friendly family atmosphere of the firm (Incorporated Playwrights or, as they affectionally call it ‘Inky P’), there are undercurrents. Actual robbery and attempted murder have occurred before they even get off that train, and yet no-one wants to call the police.

The next step, of course, is actual murder.

As is usually the case in Marsh the supporting characters are a joy and the author seems to having a lot of fun with them – there’s Susan Max, who we first saw in Enter a Murderer, and the ‘leading lady’ who Alleyn half falls in love with and interviews by taking her out for a picnic. 

The police officers are less differentiated and more in the nature of comic relief. All of them have read Alleyn’s book on police procedure (which, judging from the last couple of books, presumably contains such gems of advice as ‘scare ‘em with a reconstruction’ and ‘spike their drink if it helps’) and are just a bit too starry eyed to be believed. Alleyn, in his turn, is maddeningly self-deprecating and terribly, terribly polite (even after one of the idiots gets himself stuck behind a shed whilst chasing a suspect.)

There is a Maori doctor portrayed in what was undoubtedly a sensitive and broadminded way at the time, although there is a kind of 'otherness' to it that made me just a little uncomfy.    

And the murderer? Well I didn’t spot the murderer either time, so that’s all to the good.

Death In Ecstasy - Ngaio Marsh

Nigel Bathgate, now firmly established in the cast of characters as Alleyn’s Watson, looks out of the window of his small London flat on a rainy Sunday, hoping for something exciting or eccentric – an adventure to counter the ennui of a rainy Sunday in London, essentially - and notices a small local chapel he’s never paid much attention to before.

Out he dashes, carrying his hat in his hand, and walks, being Bathgate, straight into a murder..

To be honest I didn't want to like this book so much. I found Marsh's portrayal of the inner circle of the chapel unnecessarily harsh, and certain comments made by Alleyn and Bathgate turned me off them a bit. And while I understand (of course) that it’s no use judging a 1930s book by 2019 standards it’s worth noting that both Marsh and her detectives were much more forgiving of moral lapses in the first three books. 

So why so judgmental here?

That said, I did enjoy it. Very much. Marsh writes the hysterical and overheated (almost incestuous) atmosphere of the inner circle of the chapel really well, and makes it entirely believable that otherwise intelligent people can be pulled in by this sort of thing, behaving in ways they would never normally behave. Even become jealous they they are not the person being taken advantage of by their charismatic leader.

Other pluses are a lot of good old fashioned police work (as well as some completely unorthodox methods), and a neat tying up at the end.

I also enjoyed seeing Bathgate in a central role, since I seem to remember that Alleyn is in the antipodes for Vintage Murder, and comes back for book number six to find Bathgate and his Angela settling down to married life. Unlike those other Bright Young Things Tommy and Tuppence, I don’t think we see them centre stage again.   

A Small Chapel in Central London
 What shocking secrets hide behind these doors?