Off With His Head - Ngaio Marsh

It took me a long time to read this one. The repeated descriptions of the Morris dancing and the written-as-spoke dialects did me in. It's really not necessary to have the German character say 'ach' and make a point of her sentence construction every time she speaks, and when a similar sort of thing is being done with the rural characters as well it becomes a major distraction away from what is being said.

Anyway it's a cruel sort of humour laughing at a middle-aged woman who is frightened of the police because of her experience of the Nazis (Alleyn's attitude to this is basically 'how tiresome') and even crueller to mock the 'simple' zummerzet bloke whose father and brothers terrorise him.

As a mystery it's perfectly good. Unfortunately fair play does mean going through the dancing repeatedly, and even though it's not the happy frivolous summer pub bells-and-morris but a darker, older, more fantastical kind, done in the bitter cold, with real swords, I got very fed up of the repetition. Perhaps for another reader the occult element would have built tension, but not for me. Then there's the probably-not-necessary re-enactment, either because Superintendent Alleyn simply loves them, or maybe because Marsh's readers expected them by now. Why change a formula which works?

But given that this one seems to have driven two people to the verge of a breakdown I'm amazed someone hasn't complained to the Home Office by now.

The next is Singing in the Shrouds, which I briefly reviewed in June 2018 here, so won't do again.

Then False Scent, which was one of the ones that started me on this challenge last year. That review is here.

So I'm going to skip straight ahead to Hand in Glove for next time.