At this point in my rereading of Marsh I realize that I am having trouble seeing the books as they were received when first written and published. This particular story bothered me particularly for a number of reasons:First, Marsh's books continue to be painfully class ridden. Members of the gent...
Peregrine Gay falls down a well at the disused theatre known as The Dolphin. This unpleasant event leads the owner to change his mind about demolishing the building and instead it is restored to its former glory and its first play is one especially written by Peregrine himself. Unfortunately th...
* * * 1/2A pretty interesting plot for this Marsh novel -- death from a poisoned goblet in a wacky culty church group. The way Alleyn and the Yard were introduced was slightly flimsy, what with Nigel Bathgate (the intrepid reporter who dutifully reports on Alleyn's cases) just happening to see th...
If you’ve ever known any mean, unattractive older ladies, who seem angry and upset whenever other people are happy and fulfilled, and yet who prefer to express their anger by using indirect comments often disguised as compliments or helpful hints, you will have a riot reading Overture to Murder. ...
This is the best Marsh that I've read so far, although it's still not without problems. In this one, Inspector Alleyn is on holiday (so thankfully rid of the annoying Nigel Bathgate) in Marsh's native New Zealand. There are a lot of nice touches that stem from Marsh's love of her country: the dia...
This novel is from golden days of the puzzle mystery and everything about it stinks of the stereotypes of the day. I do find it odd that the blurb on this book is trying to convince me that we should be comparing Christie to Marsh -- while this book is just as good as anything Christie came up w...
The reviewer notes on the cover said it was "time to stop comparing Marsh to Agatha Christie, and start comparing Christie to Marsh", implying (and elsewhere boldly stating) that Marsh was the better writer. I've read just about everything Christie put out, and quite a bit of Marsh's oeuvre, and...
Ngaio Marsh, a New Zealander, was one of a group of women writers who dominated what is sometimes known as the Golden Age of British detective fiction that occurred in the 1930s and the 1940s. The others were Agatha Christie, Dorothy L Sayers and Margery Allingham. Marsh does not have Christie'...
I am going to depart a bit from my normal template I use when reviewing so if anyone is used to my regular posts, I hope you don't mind.This book was a surprise for me. I am a huge Ngaio Marsh fan but when I was originally reading these, I could not find this title in any of my used bookstores. ...
Death at the Bar by Ngaio Marsh is a "reread" for me. Reread is in quotes because I actually listened to it this time. Our local library had clear out of all their books on tape about this time last year and I scooped up this 8-cassette rendition read by James Saxon. Saxon, by the way is terri...
Death in a White Tie is a reread for me. I discovered Ngaio Marsh back at my hometown Carnegie Library (more moons ago than we need to count) and I promptly read through all the Marsh books they had. Later, about twenty years ago, I read some of them again and Death in a White Tie was one simply ...
I can't find the spelling for the characters so some of the names may be a bit off.A house party has been carefully assembled. The host, Jonathon Royal, has "plotted" to bring together a group of people with who to make a "flesh and blood" art project He wants to confine a group of people in his ...
Originally published on my blog here in July 1999.This novel was published in the early seventies, but like most of Marsh's later works it still reads as though set in the thirties. The contemporary references it contains (there is one on the first page to Steptoe and Son, for example) seem rathe...
I absolutely love British mysteries. True, they are not realistic: more an exercise in cerebration than realistic criminal investigation. It is a sort of magic trick-literary sleight of hand. We try to guess - without success - "whodunit"; and we are delighted when in the last chapter, the detect...
Dame Ngaio Marsh has pulled it off big-time in this one. This mystery which moves at breakneck pace takes place over a period of four days, during the rehearsals and opening night of the play "Thus to Revisit". The author draws her knowledge of the stage enormously, and we are presented with th...
I know the saying is "don't judge a book by its cover", but the cover can indicate how low you should keep your expectations of a given book. In this case, we had:- a spelling error in an endorsement: "Goulish enough to set the blood tingling, the scalp itching with apprehension..." Spelling erro...
Originally published on my blog here in January 2000.In the life of Ngaio Marsh, there are three major themes: her New Zealand background, her love of the theatre, and her writing of detective novels. Her autobiography, first published in the sixties and revised a few years before her death, conc...
I felt almost giddy to be reading Marsh again, and was having such fun with her style and her humor and all the good stuff that comes with a victims-confined-on-a-cruise murder; but the last quarter of the book was so oppressively heavy with the various bigotries of the time (and not in a fun, "O...
Rory Alleyn, giving a lecture, recounts a particularly interesting case involving his wife, art fraud, and a criminal team upon a boat.Alleyn's wife Troy, having just had an exhibit installed, is about to return to London when she sees a last minute cancellation on a 5 day boat trip around "Const...
Dame Ngaio Marsh certainly crafted a rich and appealing mystery (circa 1938) within "Artists in Crime". The story finds the lead detective, Roderick Alleyn, investigating the case of a murdered nude model, Sonia Gluck. The list of suspects revolves around eight individuals within an art school, i...
