Sunday 22 March 2020

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. 

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