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.