Literary Love: Ngaio Marsh’s Optimate Policeman

Ngaio Marsh was a New Zealander who wrote mysteries in the British fair-play school of detection during the Golden Age.

A contemporary (and somewhat of a competitor) of Agatha Christie, Marsh wrote her first detective novel, A Man Lay Dead featuring the gentleman¹ policeman Roderick Alleyn in 1934. She went on to write 31 additional Alleyn mysteries, ending with The Light Thickens (1982), which was published posthumously.

I discovered Ngaio Marsh in 2022 when I read Scales of Justice — a title I found on ThriftBooks — and instantly fell in love infatuation with both her fast-paced style and her insight into human character. That particular book features a district nurse, an alcoholic casualty of war, a married-for-money former adventuress, and a small cast of ‘types’, most of whom inhabit the landed classes. The story, like most of Marsh’s, revolves around the inner workings of a closed cast (as opposed to a closed room or locked room², but similar in scope) while the sleuths — primarily Detective Alleyn, but typically with assistance from his fellow policeman, Fox — untangle the knots and kipper the red herrings thrown their way.

What I like about Roderick Alleyn is that he is an approachable character, not deeply flawed but still human, whose mind you never quite know — even when he’s expounding the potentialities aloud with this co-investigators. What I like about the way Marsh writes Alleyn is that the peculiarities of the times in which the characters are living are always evident (though I’m reading in retrospect, I can’t help but wonder if some of her now-historical inclusions in this light were intentional at the time) and that the casual everyday-life details that she includes always serve to enhance the story (rather than weighing it down in domestic detritus).

In several of her earlier novels, Marsh employs a Watson — this, in the character of Nigel Bathgate, who is a newspaper reporter and who happened to be present at (and benefit from) the murder which first introduces us to Alleyn (A Man Lay Dead) — and quite often she includes local constabulary figures in addition to the called-in-from-Scotland-Yard cast. This Watson does not detract in any way from the plot or the pace thereof, but if you’re starting in the middle of the series (which I am all about! — it’s NOT always best to begin at the beginning!), he bears some explaining.

Round about mystery #6 (Artists In Crime), Alleyn obtains a love interest. Marsh spends two books deciding whether or not to marry him off, which… If you already know and love like Alleyn, you’ll feel for him during this period, as his courtship is halted by the intercessions of brutal reality. The author manages to get into some realistic emotional grit without getting mushy or messing about with the solutions of the murders in those two volumes. (By the end of the seventh novel, Death In A White Tie, all is decided.)

While there are some ‘purists’ who dislike romantic distractions of this kind — Dorothy L Sayers was criticized loudly and long for entangling her character Lord Peter Wimsey in anything so un-academic as a love affair³ — I do not personally feel it detracts from the progression of the series in any way.

BUT

If you are so inclined, perhaps you’d like to decide for yourself. 🙂

I still have six books to go before I’ve read them all, but of the 26 I’ve completed, I’d recommend the following to the neophyte Ngaio-Marsh-ian:

• Enter A Murderer (1935)
• Died In The Wool (1944)
• Scales Of Justice (1955)
• Singing In The Shrouds (1958)
• Hand In Glove (1962)

If you are a mystery lover and choose to read any of these — or others! — please come back and let me know. I’d love to hear what you think!

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Are you a fan of Golden Age mystery fiction?

If so, what books or authors do you recommend?

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¹‘gentleman’ meaning, as in old-school British English, ‘landed gentry’

²The best locked-room mystery writer, of the Golden Age or any other, was John Dickson Carr. Thus is my wholly biased (and absolutely correct!) opinion. 🙂

³I quite enjoyed this affair, not least because his love interest (Harriet Vane) is essentially a fictionalized version of the author. Sayers’ books, though — unlike many others I enjoy — are best read in order, starting with Whose Body? (1923), which is a title I mentioned previously in this A-to-Z series.