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.