Thursday, 10 September 2020

Ngaio Marsh: Clutch of Constables

One of the interesting things about reading a series in order for the first time is seeing groups of books together in ways you might not have previously noticed. I had never noticed, for example, that first Troy and then Alleyn are on holiday alone in a small group of strangers in two consecutive books - although the other spouse is always in the wings somewhere, being written to, and an explanation given for why their son Ricky is not with Troy in the first one when she decides to take an impromptu canal tour of the waterways. 

And promptly falls down a kind of rabbit-hole into the middle of something strange and unpleasant which she gets flashes of but doesn't really understand. Something that could be easily dismissed as fancy if it weren't interleaved with a lecture Alleyn is giving to students at a much later date, describing the case in hindsight. 

And yet.. I didn't find it gelled. That lecture only interrupts the flow, and I was deeply disbelieving of so many people's actions and motivations. My first issue is that the Troy of the earlier books is not a person of great instinct. She is a great observer of detail - in previous books she has noticed how full a handbag is at different stages of the evening, or how a young child spells grandfather, even before she had any reason to think it mattered - but that is not the same thing. Here we have something more like intuition, which I feel she has always distrusted before. 

Then there are the police stations she's calling into, whose officers essentially patronise her and yet tell her to go to the next police station when the boat arrives there, which is just plain inconsistent - if they're politely trying to put her off why do they keep asking her to drop in? Then make it sound as if she's the one insisting on seeing them? 

The actions of the murdered woman and the criminals though, are even more particularly ludicrous. 

Gap because there will be spoilers..........





Particularly bewildering things about the victim include: 

Why someone who thought they'd stumbled onto a crime would write it down, even if she was in the habit of writing things down, and then having done so and dropped her journal in the canal by accident, would attract attention to it and thus give someone a chance to look at it. 

Why she would sleep up on deck alone if she was worried.

Why she's been going round telling people she has a FabergĂ© necklace she always wears. 

Obvious answer to all the above is she's not very bright, which I can accept, although Marsh's portrayals of undersexed middle aged women being unattractive idiots are a tad too frequent for my liking, and sit somewhat strangely with the fact that two of the male occupants of the boat make a dead set for Troy despite the fact she must surely be 50 if not 60 by now. (I can sort of swallow her stepping into the same fountain of youth as her husband, but to have suddenly developed the same fatal attraction as him was a leap too far.) 

As for the crooks:

Why did they move the body the way they did and to where they did? i.e. somewhere on the boat's route back where she would be recognised if found? 

Why did they go ahead with the plan to plant their fake painting locally and use Troy as a witness, given they must have known by then who she was and that she was already suspicious? 

But most of all why are so many of them there - almost everyone on the boat - when that's not at all necessary for the job. Is it the annual works do? Can they claim it back on expenses? So many questions. 

Lastly, how much preparation did they actually do for this major piece of fraud? They didn't even know that the boat went back through the town after closing time and they'd have to take a bus back to plant their cache. 

And all this is meant to be orchestrated by (wait for it) the Jampot, a criminal mastermind who Alleyn is telling his students about however many years later but who should really be textbook example one of  'crooks who are not as clever as they think they are'.

Next time: When in Rome. 

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