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.