A MAN LAY DEAD

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 familiar territory with the so-called Queens of Crime: Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, Margery Allingham and Ngaio Marsh.

I started with the first book in Ngaio Marsh’s Roderick Alleyn series, A Man Lay Dead. I really, really wanted to like it, 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 – this one is called Frantock Hall – at its heart. Its owner, Sir Hubert Handesley, is famous for hosting extravagant weekend parties and his collection of unusual, rare and stabby antique weapons. His guests are a thoroughly nice 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 secret relationship with the caddish Charles; and a Russian doctor, Dr Tokareff. Servants abound, but in this house there is, unusually, a Russian butler, Vassily.

The weekend begins with cocktails and dinner, after which Sir Hubert invites his guests to play the ‘Murder Game’ (a popular parlour game in the 1930s) in which a secretly assigned murderer ‘kills’ a fellow guest, who then have to deduce his or her identity.  Naturally, someone – the womanising Charles –  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.

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 plan to read one of the later ones to see how he turns out.

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 she 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.