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??
Mystery- Death by Committee 