Dead Water (1963) – Ngaio Marsh

Continuing my reading of Ngaio Marsh, I found Dead Water to be more engaging than several I’ve recently reviewed. It’s unusual in that Roderick Alleyn actually has a personal interest in this case – he doesn’t just appear halfway through the book in his professional capacity. Here his longtime ago French tutor, Miss Emily Pride, seems to be in danger, and he rushes to protect her though it means interrupting his vacation with his wife Troy.  This takes him to a town called Portcarrow, which is an island at high tide but connected to the mainland by a causeway during low tide – a time of “dead water.”  Two years earlier, a ‘miracle’ had occurred in which a young boy named Willy Trehern had been cured of his hideous case of warts by immersing them in the water of a hillside spring; since then, many of the townspeople have benefited financially from the groups of visitors who come to the spring to rid themselves of other conditions. But Miss Pride has inherited the island and plans to put a stop to these ‘pilgrimages,’ which makes her very unpopular with some residents of Portcarrow. Indeed, there has already been at least one accident (?) that has occurred by the time Alleyn arrives.

When a murder does occur, Alleyn is there, asking questions, checking timetables, interviewing witnesses. Eventually, he is joined by his usual sidekick, Inspector Fox, and his assistants Bailey and Thompson.  There are suspects aplenty: an alcoholic landlord, his aloof but beautiful wife, a doctor, Willy’s parents, and a shopkeeper who has made a healthy profit from the tourists. 

Like Roberta Gray in Death of a Peer, one of the central figures in this book, Jenny Williams, is a New Zealander living in England. But this seems arbitrary: Jenny is a former teacher of one of the characters (Willy) and the love interest of another (Patrick) and could have been from anywhere. The courtship of Jenny and Patrick is barely shown anyway. And as in Overture to Death, Marsh is very unkind in her treatment of  ‘spinsters’ – who are described as sexually frustrated, petty and vindictive – though Miss Pride is, of course, an exception.

Once Alleyn has identified the murderer, there is a chase through a storm, which was meant, I assume, to be exciting but actually comes across as a little dull. Dead Water is an otherwise entertaining mystery.

Last Ditch (1977) – Ngaio Marsh

This is one of Marsh’s last mysteries – and one of her weakest. There is the usual start with a family of gentry – the Pharamonds – and an early death, soon suspected to be a murder. Ricky Alleyn, the young son of Superintendent Roderick Alleyn and his artist-wife Troy, is visiting with the Pharamonds so there’s a good reason for Supt. Alleyn to get involved. The setting is an interesting one: an island in the English channel with close ties to France. So why doesn’t this book work?

For one thing, there is a connection to drug trafficking, with illegal substances coming in from Marseilles. Marsh doesn’t seem comfortable writing about drugs and drug addicts, as shown by the characters from When in Rome.  Roderick Alleyn and his constant associate, Inspector Fox, have many long discussions of the European drug trade, which seem forced and are mostly boring. And Alleyn’s manner when he withholds an addict’s “fix” until he gives information seems uncharacteristically harsh, but perhaps his concerns about his son make this understandable.

Despite the fact that Ricky becomes infatuated with the already-married Julia Pharamond, there’s not much charming banter around the Pharamond dinner table, as one would have expected in an earlier Marsh mystery. Instead, there is a lot of physical hardship for Ricky, who is nearly drowned, then beaten up, and later sufficiently wounded to need hospitalization. Late in the book (page 247 in copy), Julia identifies herself as a Lamprey by birth, which recalls the great fun of the earlier (1940) Death of a Peer, but nothing comes of this.

At long last, when it appeared that the last 20 pages were racing to a dazzling Golden Age finish, Marsh threw the ending away. So a disappointment in all ways.

 

Hand in Glove (1962) – Ngaio Marsh

Looking back at my last Ngaio Marsh review, Scales of Justice, I am struck by how similar that book is to this one. In both books, we are first introduced to families with connections to nobility, and in both books, Inspector Roderick Alleyn appears about 90 pages in, only after a murder occurs. Once again, there’s a young couple in love. And once again, characters jarringly “ejaculate” (meaning ‘exclaim’) – wasn’t it getting a bit late (1962) for that usage?

This time around, the action occurs among the friends and family of Lady Bantling, nee Desiree Ormsbury, a slightly scandalous but likable woman who has had three husbands: first the late Lord Bantling, then a lawyer named Harold Cartell from whom she is divorced but with whom she remains on fairly friendly terms, and a somewhat younger man, Bimbo Dodds, who was saved from bankruptcy by his marriage to her. Her son by the first husband is a young artist named Andrew Bantling, who falls almost immediately in love with a young woman named Nicola (conveniently a friend of Inspector Alleyn and his wife Troy). Harold shares a household with Mr. Percival Pyke Period, a well-known author of etiquette books. Other important characters are Harold Cartell’s sister, Connie, and her adopted “niece” Mary (known as “Moppet”) and Mary’s disreputable boyfriend Leonard Leiss.

Desiree and Bimbo give a party that features a treasure hunt, and as the party ends, one of the characters is found murdered. Several people have good motives for the murder and Alleyn must sort through them to solve the crime. Marsh lived until 1982 and would write several award-winning mysteries after this one, but Hand in Glove is a pleasurable, formulaic mystery – nothing special.

A word about book covers: there seem to be at least a half-dozen different covers for this book. I chose the one above because it shows a pair of gloves, even though they are very different from the heavy leather gloves that figure into this story. The one that puzzled me the most was one, shown below, with a calendar open to the month of April – what did that have to do with the story? I looked at the book again, searching for any mention of April. Finally I found it: the first paragraph of the book has Alfred, manservant to Mr. Period, tear off the March page of the calendar to expose a new page showing a young girl smirking through some apple blossoms. It really doesn’t figure into the story at all. Is it possible that the cover artist read only the first paragraph of the story before designing the cover??

Scales of Justice (1955) – Ngaio Marsh

Continuing my journey through the works of Ngaio Marsh, I’ve just completed Scales of Justice (1955). On the back cover, there was a quote from the legendary Anthony Boucher (of Bouchercon fame) that read “Her best pure formal detective story.” Indeed, the detection by Marsh’s sleuth, Roderick Alleyn of Scotland Yard, may be admirable, but I couldn’t connect in any signifciant way to any of the characters. (Maybe that’s the “pure formal” part?)

Usually, Marsh introduces the characters in her stories with charming, even funny, vignettes. (See for example, Death of a Peer, reviewed here.) A murder occurs, and only then does Alleyn make his appearance. In Scales of Justice, we are introduced to four families of “gentry” (as opposed to the “ordinary folk”) living in the town of Swevenings on the Chyne River. First and foremost, there are the Lacklanders (three generations: Lady Lacklander, her son George – whom she has to remind constantly not to be “an ass” –  and his son Dr. Mark Lacklander). Next there is the Cartarette family: Colonel Cartarette, Rose, his daughter from his first marriage, and his second wife Kitty. Octavius Danberry-Phinn, who lives alone with his many cats, and Commander Syce, retired from the Royal Navy and suffering from lumbago, whose main pasttime is archery, complete the picture. Mark Lacklander and Rose Cartarette are in love. Syce once killed (accidentally, he claims) one of Phinn’s cats with an arrow. And there is an intense rivalry over catching an enormous trout called “The Old ‘Un.”  The ‘scales’ in the title refer to the fish.

A murder occurs, and the body is found by Nurse Kettle, the “district nurse” who is administering care to both Lady Lacklander and Commander Syce.  (The role of district nurse seems to be a position unique to the UK, Australia and New Zealand.) Lady Lacklander insists that Alleyn, who is gentry himself, be the one who is called in to solve it. Alleyn and his sidekick Fox arrive on the scene on page 90, and fairly soon Alleyn seems to know who the murderer is.  He tells Fox several times that he knows, but he never shares any of his thoughts with the reader. The story continues for another hundred pages, and new facts emerge about these people who thought they knew all about each other. Eventually the murderer is revealed and it is no great surprise.

Readers who are unfamiliar with books from the 1940s and 1950s may find it jarring how often someone in the book ‘ejaculates’ – meaning ‘exclaims.’ 

I learned new things about fish scales from this book, but nothing else was very memorable.

 

Murder in Mesopotamia (1936) – Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie, whose second husband was the British archeologist Max Mallowan, once said, “An archeologist is the best husband any woman can get. Just consider: The older she gets, the more he is interested in her.”

Christie met Mallowan in Iraq in 1928, and married him in 1930. She often accompanied him on his digs, helping with the photography at excavations in Iraq and Syria. After World War 2, she helped with his excavation of Assyrian ruins in Iraq. So when I was searching for a mystery to complete a library book series on archeologists as detectives, choosing this 1936 book by Christie seemed like a good idea.

But the archeology is barely there. This is really a “manor house” mystery moved to Iraq. Instead of a group of people in a stately home of England, there is a group of people living in a large house in the fictional town of Hassanieh, Iraq; there is even a drawing of the house included. All of the occupants of the house are engaged in the excavation of a nearby ruin, Tell Yarimjah, supervised by the Swedish-American, Dr. Eric Leidner. Some of them are new to Leidner’s team and some are longtime colleagues. But it is his wife, Louise Leidner, that is the focus of the mystery. She is in a terrible state, having been harassed by anonymous letters and strangers peeering in windows at her. Her husband hires Amy Leatheran, a nurse, to be a companion for Louise, and it is Amy who narrates most of the story.

When a murder occurs, Hercule Poirot is called into the case (he first appears on page 80). Poirot is conveniently near, having been involved in disentangling a “military scandal in Syria.” Nurse Leatheran becomes, for the duration of this book, a stand-in for Poirot’s usual narrator Captain Hastings. Predictably, there is a person who guesses the solution, but is too disturbed by her conclusion to tell anyone right away; I knew immediately that she would be murdered before she could reveal what she knew.

And of course, there is the usual scene in which Poirot assembles all the suspects and reviews the case, and then announces the ingenious solution to the mystery. However, as many have noted,  the novel is “marred by an ending which goes beyond the improbable to the inconceivable” (quote from Robert Barnard in his book about Christie, A Talent to Deceive,1980).

Though I was disappointed in the scarcity of archeological detail, I found this a very clever and engaging mystery – until that ending.

 

 

 

A Salute to Peter Lovesey

I’ve mentioned before that I compose a “Top Ten” list of mysteries each year to post on Dorothy-L. When I look over the last twenty years of these lists, one name stands out: Peter Lovesey.  I read my first Lovesey book – The Last Detective – in 2003 and was hooked. (The book won the 1992 Anthony Award for Best Mystery, so I don’t know what took me so long to discover it.) It was his first mystery featuring detective Peter Diamond, and I soon caught up with that series. Since then I find myself looking forward to a new Lovesey/Diamond book each year.

Mr. Lovesey has been writing mysteries since 1970. His first mystery, Wobble to Death, was about a road race, the “wobble.” Fifty years later, his book The Finisher (2020) was also about a race, the Bath half-marathon – and it’s one of his best! Peter Diamond, at first Inspector and more recently Superintendant, in the Bath police department, is sometimes irascible, often witty, and occasionally impatient with “modern” police methods, especially those involving computers (though more recently he seems to have made his peace with those). But the reader grows to love him, just as his team of Bath homicide detectives eventually do. The plots are never repetitive, but always twisty and clever; the writing always first rate.  [I haven’t yet read the latest Diamond mystery, Diamond and the Eye (2021), but it’s there on my ToBeRead pile.]  It’s just about impossible to pick favorites, but I have to single out Bloodhounds (1996), which is both a locked room mystery and a parody of mystery book clubs, Diamond Dust (2002) for its daring twist, and Another One Goes Tonight (2016) for sheer fun.

So here’s my salute: Well done Mr. Lovesey!! Thanks for giving me years of happy reading. I’m hoping for many more.

And here are the books that have made my “Top Ten” of the last two decades (all are from the Peter Diamond series, except where noted):

The Last Detective (1991)

Diamond Solitaire (1992)

Bloodhounds (1996)

Upon a Dark Night (1998)

Diamond Dust (2002)

The House Sitter (2003)

The False Inspector Dew (1982) – a standalone, winner of the Gold Dagger

The Secret Hangman (2007)

Skeleton Hill (2009)

The Headhunters (2008) – a Hen Malin mystery

Stagestruck (2011)

The Tooth Tattoo, (2013)

The Stone Wife (2014)

Down Among the Dead Men (2015)

Another One Goes Tonight (2016)

Beau Death (2017)

Killing with Confetti (2019)

The Finisher (2020)

Singing in the Shrouds – Ngaio Marsh (1958)

Ngaio Marsh spent much of her life on ships, travelling from New Zealand to England and back, so she knew a lot about long sea voyages. (Maybe she’s even showing off a little in this book when she talks about things like the “forrard well-deck” and “hatch combing?”)

Ten years after Singing in the Shrouds was published, Marsh sent Roderick Alleyn’s artist wife, Troy, on a river cruise with a murderer aboard (see my review of Clutch of Constables). But in 1958, it was Alleyn himself who boarded the Cape Farewell for an ocean voyage to South Africa in search of a serial killer suspected to be onboard. The so-called “Flower Murderer” is a strangler of women who sings as he kills and then leaves flowers on the body.

   On the ship with Alleyn are four women: the elegant, flirtatious, but much admired Mrs. Dillington-Blick, the young and attractive Brigid Carmichael, heart-broken after recently being left at the altar; Miss Abbott, an unhappy spinster who is an expert on Gregorian chants; and the querulous Mrs. Cuddy, who is traveling with her husband, a draper. Which one is the likely victim?

   There are plenty of male suspects: a TV celebrity, a pedantic schoolmaster, an Anglo-Catholic priest, a young psychiatrist, an elderly philatelist, members of the crew, and the Captain himself. Alleyn is traveling incognito as Allan Broderick, and he writes home to Troy frequently, sharing his thoughts. He seems to have a most likely candidate for murderer right from the start,  but Marsh doesn’t reveal exactly who that is till the end.

   The solution is a bit too “pop psychology” for me, but the book as a whole is a smooth, entertaining read. Not one of Marsh’s very best, but a good classic mystery.

Martha Grimes: An Addendum

Sad to say: The Old Success was a failure as far as I’m concerned.

After her previous book, The Knowledge (2018), made my Top Ten list for 2019, I was eager to read the next installment. (See my review of The Knowledge here.) But The Old Success (2019) was awful – I think she phoned it in.  Characters from books written 10-30 years ago were mentioned without explanation; other ongoing characters, like Vivian Rivington and Diane DeMornay, were brought in for no apparent reason except perhaps to give them a curtain call. And towards the end, a new character was introduced whose existence seemed unnecessary unless he is to reappear as an important character in a forthcoming book. The plot was ho-hum and the solution not very satisfying.

I became very frustrated by the references to earlier books, which I couldn’t quite place. (I’ve read all of her Richard Jury books.) Finally, I tried Googling one of the characters whom I thought I was supposed to recognize, and I found this: “Lady Eleanor Summerston, a character longtime Grimes readers will remember from 1987’s The Five Bells and Bladestone.” Really? Is it reasonable to assume that even faithful readers will remember a character from 32 years earlier in a series?!

Grimes was born in 1931. Perhaps at 90, her talents are waning? I hope not – I’d like to see Richard Jury and Melrose Plant go out in a blaze of glory, as Reginald Hill’s Andy Dalziel and Peter Pascoe did in Midnight Fugue (2009).

(See my review of Midnight Fugue within this article.)

Parnell Hall: An Appreciation

Parnell Hall (1944 – 2020) died this past week, and I’m so saddened by this. Parnell was an old friend from DorothyL and from so many mystery conferences like Bouchercon and Malice Domestic. He was also an occasional penpal, sending me hilarious answers to my (I thought) innocent questions.

But most of all, he was a fine mystery writer. Because his books were so funny, some people overlooked how cleverly plotted they were. I’m referring here to his 20 Stanley Hastings books, all of which I’ve read, and the 6 Steve Winslow books (written under the pseudonym of J.P. Hailey), of which I’ve read a few. (They’re hard to find, but maybe it’s time I tracked a few more down.) I could never get into his “Puzzle Lady” books; though I love puzzles myself, I never felt that his heart was in these. Stanley Hastings, on the other hand, was Parnell’s alter ego.

As I look at the list of books that have made by Top Ten each year, I see Stanley’s adventures appearing numerous times: Client (1990), Shot (1991), Actor (1993), Suspense (1998), Cozy (2001), Hitman (2007).  I’ve used Shot, Actor and Suspense with various book groups as well, and Stanley soon became a beloved character for many.  Since Parnell started his career as an actor, the books based on that experience (Movie and Actor) were particularly resonant. Some of his later books were meta-mysteries, in which he examined various genres of crime fiction like suspense novels, so-called “cozies”, and caper novels. In Suspense, for example, he dealt with the proposition that a good suspense novel could not be written in the first person. (And guess what? It could.)

In his last days, Parnell posted on Facebook from his hospital bed, asking his many Facebook friends to buy his latest (and only standalone) mystery, Chasing Jack. I did. But I think it will be a while before I can bring myself to read it, knowing that it’s his last.

 

Links to books mentioned in this post:

Detective (1987) if you want to begin at the beginning (nominated for an Edgar and a Shamus award)

Client (1990)

Shot (1991)

Actor (1993)

Movie (1995)

Suspense (1998)

Cozy (2001)

Hitman (2007)

Chasing Jack (2020)

When in Rome (1970) – Ngaio Marsh

Ngaio Marsh (1895-1982) began writing Golden Age mysteries in 1934 and continued writing them right up to her death. Some of the later ones are excellent (see my reviews of Clutch of Constables and Light Thickens) and some are disappointing (Photo Finish). I think this one belongs in the latter category.

In this book, Superintendent Roderick Alleyn is – no surprise here – in Rome. He’s on the case of some international drug dealers and, in that role, he has been given an introduction to Valdarno, the Questore of Rome. Alleyn joins a tour group of visitors from England and the Netherlands, which is led by one Sebastian Miller, a man of dubious reputation, and features guest lectures by the famous author, Barnaby Grant. On the first day of the tour, during a visit to the Basilica of San Tommaso in Pallaria, Miller disappears. Is he dead? Has he run off? [There is a  real San Tomasso in Parione located near the Piazza Navone, as the one in the book is, but actually Marsh has based her description of the basilica on the real Church of San Clemente al Laterano, a structure built of three levels: an 11th C basilica on top of a 4th C basilica on top of an underground 2nd C temple to the Etruscan god Mithras.]

Clearly Marsh had visited Rome, (she thanks the New Zealand Ambasssador to Rome and his wife, and their staff for their help), and was very impressed with the basilica; I’m sure it is amazing. But the book lingered there for much too long to keep my interest, even with Sebastian Miller going missing. The characters themselves were not very appealing: the writer Barnaby Grant and the young woman, Sophy Jason, who works for his publisher and is clearly destined to be a love interest, are the nicest of the group. The Baron and Baroness Van der Veghel, a Dutch couple who reside in Geneva, are sweet and a bit silly, and unfortunately say things like “my darlink.” And we are reminded too often that they resemble the Etruscan statues in the underground chambers. Major Sweet is a grumpy British stereotype, and Kenneth Dorne a dissolute drug addict. The cruelest descriptions are reserved for Dorne’s elderly aunt, Lady Braceley, who still fancies herself attractive to men: “More than the precariously maintained mask or the flabby underarm or the traitorous neck. It’s the legs…But the face was not too good either. Even if one discounted the ruches under the eyes and the eyes themselves, there was still that dreadfully slack mouth.” I noted in my review of Overture to Death that Marsh in her mid-40s was very harsh in her treatment of middle-aged spinsters; here she is at age 75 treating old women just as cruelly. The spinsters were sexually repressed and ‘holier-than-thou’; the elderly Lady Bracely is the opposite: “She has experienced everything, except poverty.”

Giving credit where it’s due, I have to say that Marsh did a fine job with the plot twist near the end and Alleyn’s final disposal of the case. And I liked Alleyn’s summation: “What was the position of a British investigator in Rome when a British subject of criminal propensities had almost certainly been murdered, possibly by another Briton, not impossibly by a Dutchman, not quite inconceivably by an Italian, on a property administered by an Irish order of Dominican monks?”