Ngaio Marsh - Death at the Dolphin

My very favourite thing about this book is Peregrine Jay's love affair with the old Dolphin Theatre and his seizing what might be his only chance to persuade the owner not to pull it down but run it as a going concern. He gets his dream job of manager, seeing the marble polished and the bombed-out stage fixed and even writing the very first play. It's wonderful and improbable but somehow done with such sleight of hand and such joy you can't help believing in it anyway. 

And nothing - cantankerous actors with tangled love lives, a millionaire who seems slightly 'off', even the discovery of a priceless relic - really tops or undermines that for me. 

Of course ostensibly this is a murder story and true enough the murder is tragic and pointless - murder for gain that ultimately doesn't come off. But, like the other often fun supporting characters - Jay's antiques restorer friend, the child prodigy whose mother sees him as a meal ticket - or the sheer ridiculousness of the secret code to the safe being widely guessed at and yet still not changed even though Alleyn strongly recommends it - it's wasted here. Nothing can take the bloom off the history of the old Dolphin and it's glorious revival from blitzed out wreck to going concern. 

Next up is Clutch of Constables, which I seem to remember as mostly about Troy and a canal trip.

Also, as an aside - where is Bathgate?  It's interesting the demotion from the earliest books where we were looking in from his point of view - very Hastings, very Watson - to intersection with Alleyn because he's the busy journalist lucky enough to also be a friend, thumbing his nose at his rivals, and finally the odd letter and the war and a brief 'goodbye, Roderick's back soon' with Troy at one of the big London stations (Paddington, I think), and although he pops up in one more book he makes so little impression that this is how I always think of him, running down the platform waving goodbye to Troy, who will be the outsider point of view from now on, a relic of the jazz age and early books with their Bolshevist plots.