Ngaio Marsh - Light Thickens

This is the last of Marsh's books, published in 1982, and we're back in the Dolphin Theatre where Peregrine Jay is producing Macbeth. 

I've never actually seen Macbeth, but it's one of those cultural phenomena that it's impossible not to pick up a lot of information about from other sources. In my case that was primarily from Blackadder - both the ghost and the three witches are referenced in the first program of the first series (in 1983, when I was ten) - and later, in the 90s, when Pratchett inverted it for Wyrd Sisters. 

Off the top of my head Agatha Christie also mentions Macbeth at least three times:

In Sparkling Cyanide when Tony is speaking to Race: 'Ah but what Macbeth saw really was a ghost! It wasn't a ham actor wearing Banquo's duds! I'm prepared to admit that a real ghost might bring it's own atmosphere from another world.'

In By the Pricking of my Thumbs (which title is taken from the play) when Tuppence quotes it and then goes on to propound her theory that Lady Macbeth egged Macbeth on because she was bored, and incidentally (I paraphrase) particularly bored of Macbeth.  

And again in The Pale Horse when the three witches are discussed and someone (I forget who) suggests that more effective casting than the usual prancing around and in your face evil would be to have three old women just looking slyly at one another. That the very banality of evil somehow makes it more disturbing. 

I don't know if theatrical fashion ever swung that way - The Pale Horse was written in 1961 - but if it did I think it must have swung back again by the time Marsh is writing. Her witches are every inch in your face. Choreographed to leap off gibbets and leer malevolently. 

In fact sometimes in this book it seems as if this whole play is not being so much acted as danced. The fight scene in particular is laboriously choreographed, but many other scenes are rehearsed so often and Jay's vision for the whole thing explained so thoroughly that the reader (this reader anyway) is left with a real hope that all this dreary repetition is relevant.   

Not that there aren't moments of tension. Someone starts leaving the most frightening props - the false severed heads - in places designed to startle and scare. Macbeth and Macduff don't get on, which is particularly concerning given that fight scene. Certain members of the cast have secrets and others are strong believers in the Macbeth curse (which again I think I first learnt of via Blackadder. This time in series 3, in 1987). But these interesting details seem lost in a sea of stage direction and visits to the pub and drives up and down the Embankment (something very much of the time I think. Twenty years before when we first met Jay, even quite well off people walked, and if it was dark or the weather was bad they took taxis. By 82 they drive everywhere.)

Anyway, after the murder, things click into place. The pace either accelerates or appears to. Alleyn investigates. Fox turns up. Secrets are revealed. Jay's sons, who seemed an irrelevance on first appearance, become more rounded - yet without turning into tiresome miniature adults. Emily, Jay's wife, shows signs of still having a personality beyond feeding him, and we are reminded she is also of the theatre.

Macbeth will close of course, but the Dolphin (under the bequest of the late Mr Conducis) carries on, as immortal as Alleyn. 

Which wraps up this challenge. I'm not going to end with an analysis of whether Marsh deserved her title of one of the Queens of Golden Age Detective Fiction. It seems obvious to me she did. People went on reading her books through five decades, and it's not hard to see why. 

I am tempted to start a Margery Allingham or Gladys Mitchell challenge next, but not until I get the 80s out of the way..