After a brief visit with two of the lesser-known (lesser-known today, I mean; they were famous in their time) female authors of the so-called Golden Age of Detective Fiction, I am back to the Queens of Crime.
Ngaio Marsh (1895-1982) was born in New Zealand, worked there as an actress and in 1928 moved to London to pursue her career. For the rest of her life divided her time between the UK and her homeland. She wrote A Man Lay Dead after reading one of Dorothy Sayers’ novels, and thinking that she could do that too.
I really, really wanted to like A Man Lay Dead, mainly because Marsh was a New Zealander and therefore almost one of us. But it was another English house-party murder, and I am basically over the upper-classes. Sigh.
As usual, the setting is a country estate with a grand house, Frantock Hall, at its heart. Its owner, Sir Hubert Handesley, is famous for hosting extravagant weekends. His guests are young journalist Nigel Bathgate; Nigel’s philandering cousin Charles Rankin; Sir Hubert’s niece Angela; unhappily married couple Arthur and Marjorie Wilde; Rosamund Grant, who is in a relationship with the caddish Charles; and a Russian doctor, Dr Tokareff. Servants abound, but in this house there is a Russian butler, Vassily.
The weekend begins. There are cocktails, dinners, secrets, dalliances and parlour games. Naturally Sir Hubert collects ancient weapons, especially if they are rare, sharp and stabby. Of course, he also wants his guests to play the ‘Murder Game’, which was actually a popular game at the time. And it follows that someone is really murdered. There are seven suspects, but every single one has an alibi, and Detective Chief-Inspector Roderick Alleyn of the Metropolitan Police is called in to solve the puzzle.
A Man Lay Dead was Marsh’s debut detective novel and it shows. Roderick Alleyn is one of the ‘gentleman detectives’ who were so popular between the wars, only in this case, he is a professional policeman and not an amateur like Lord Peter Wimsey and Albert Campion. With his aristocratic family and background (educated at Eton, just like Boris Johnson!), he’s not your usual copper but at times he behaves a bit like an upper-class twit. It seems as if Marsh didn’t know quite what she wanted him to be in this first book. Marsh herself spoke critically of A Man Lay Dead, recognising that it had some serious flaws. The sub-plot featuring Bolsheviks, a secret Russian brotherhood and a priceless ritual dagger is simply silly and as for the ‘ingenious’ murder method…really?
Marsh went on to write 32 Roderick Alleyn novels, so I had better read one of the later ones to see how he turns out.