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.