Ngaio Marsh’s Artists In Crime: A Deadly Art School

Artists In Crime is Ngaio Marsh’s 6th mystery novel featuring the indefatigable Scotland Yard detective, Roderick Alleyn. This time, the setting is a small gathering of artists at a rural estate, Tatter’s End, owned by the famous artist, Agatha Troy. Alleyn and Troy meet on a ship sailing from New Zealand to Canada. In the last Alleyn mystery, Vintage Murder, he solved a murder involving a theater troupe touring New Zealand.

Alleyn and Troy immediately get off on the wrong foot, as she assumes he is an ignorant Philistine when he comes across her on deck finishing a painting. He is very polite and assumes she wants nothing to do with him. It turns out they are attracted to each other, but neither one is able to break through the icy manners that characterize their interactions.

Once everyone is back home in England, Alleyn is visiting his mother when he gets a call that a young woman has died at a nearby location – Agatha Troy’s Tatter’s End. So, his year-long sabbatical is cut short, and he is soon reunited with his dependable and stolid assistant, Detective-Inspector “Brer” Fox, Detective-Sergeant Bailey, and good friend Nigel Bathgate.

The victim turns out to be an artist’s model, Sonia Gluck. She was posing for Troy’s art school students when someone rigged a long knife to project up through the slats of a bench that is covered with drapery. When one of the students pushed her down into the required pose, the knife stabbed her in the back and pierced her heart, causing immediate death.

The students are a motley crew: Katti Bostock, Agatha Troy’s best friend; Cedric Malmsley, an effete book illustrator, who fancies himself the next Oscar Wilde; Wolf Garcia, an amoral, womanizing sculptor; Francis Ormerin, a French artist; Phillida Lee, a middle-class young woman who studied at The Slade School of Fine Art; Watt Hatchett, an uncouth Australian youth who Troy brought with her from her trip; Basil Pilgrim, the son of a British lord who is very upright (and uptight) and who is engaged to Valmai Seacliff, an extraordinarily beautiful young woman.

Almost every member of the school has some motive to want Sonia Gluck dead, but all fingers point to Garcia. Sonia was his mistress, and it soon emerges that she is pregnant. He is a penniless drifter with undeniable artistic talent but no sense of moral responsibility. He disappeared the evening before Sonia died, and a lot of the book involves Alleyn’s efforts to locate him. 

I won’t go any further into the murder mystery, but Artists In Crime is the first novel in which Alleyn is allowed to exhibit any feelings for a woman. He really loves Agatha Troy, and Marsh’s treatment of their relationship is interesting. 

She also has great fun satirizing the pretentions of modern artists. For example, while Alleyn is questioning the insufferably self-important Cedric Malmsey, they have this exchange:

Alleyn said: “When did you leave the studio on Friday afternoon, Mr. Malmsley?”

“At five. I kept an eye on the time because I had to bathe and change and catch the six o’clock bus.”

“You left Mr. Garcia still working?”

“Yes. He said he wanted to pack up the clay miniature ready to send it up to London the next morning.”

“He didn’t begin to pack it while you were there?”

“Well, he got me to help him carry in a zinc-lined case from the junk-room. He said it would do quite well.”

“He would,” said Troy grimly. “I paid fifteen shillings for that case.”

“How would it be managed?” asked Alleyn. “Surely a clay model is a ticklish thing to transport?”

 “He’d wrap masses of damp cloths round it,” explained Troy.

“How about lifting it? Wouldn’t it be very heavy?”

“Oh, he’d thought all that out,” said Malmsley, yawning horribly. “We put the case on a tall stool in the window with the open end sideways, beside the tall stool he worked on. The thing was on a platform with wheels. He just had to wheel it into the case and fill the case with packing.”

“How about getting it into the van?”

“Dear me. Isn’t this all rather tedious?”

“Extremely. A concise answer would enable us to move on to a more interesting narrative.”

Troy gave an odd little snort of laughter.

Marsh, Ngaio. Artists in Crime: Inspector Roderick Alleyn #6 (p. 70). Felony & Mayhem Press. Kindle Edition.

Of the six Inspector Alleyn mysteries I’ve read, Artists in Crime is the most fun. The Marsh has a great time with the prickly personalities of the various artists involved, and the mystery itself is fairly clever. Alleyn definitely works well when he has his sidekicks Fox and Bailey to interact with. All in all, I highly recommend this one, and if you haven’t read anything by Ngaio Marsh, Artists in Crime is a great place to start.

Ngaio Marsh’s Vintage Murder

Vintage Murder [1937] is Ngaio Marsh’s fifth mystery featuring her returning hero, Detective Inspector Roderick Alleyn. I think Ms. Marsh must have had some experience working in the theater, since this is the second mystery set in a theatrical production. Ms. Marsh also aims her barbed wit at the group of actors in this novel, skewering their superficiality:

One by one the members of the company came out from their dressing-rooms. Most actors have an entirely separate manner for occasions when they mix with outsiders. This separate manner is not so much an affectation as a persona, a mask used for this particular appearance. They wish to show how like other people they are. It is an innocent form of snobbishness. You have only to see them when the last guest has gone to realise how complete a disguise the persona may be.

Marsh, Ngaio. Vintage Murder: Inspector Roderick Alleyn #5 (p. 32). Felony & Mayhem Press. Kindle Edition.

Vintage Murder is also set in New Zealand, which is Ms. Marsh’s native land. Detective Inspector Alleyn is on vacation, and he ends up on the same train as a troupe of British actors – Incorporated Playhouses Ltd. –  getting ready to tour that country. The lead actress, Carolyn Dacres, is married to the managing director, Alfred Meyer. She is getting older, but still quite beautiful. Another actor, Hailey Hambledon, is in love with Ms. Dacres, but she refuses to return his affections.

The first performance is on Carolyn Dacres’ birthday, and her devoted husband has arranged a celebratory dinner for her after the show. Inspector Alleyn is invited, as well as several local persons. The coup de grace of the dinner is to be a huge bottle of champagne that will descend from the ceiling when Ms. Dacres cuts a ribbon. She does so, but someone has tampered with the counterweights holding the bottle up, and it plummets onto poor Mr. Meyer’s head, killing him instantly.

There are various other actors and backstage workers at the dinner, most of whom might have a motive for wanting Alfred Meyer dead. Of course, once the local police discover that the world-famous sleuth Roderick Alleyn is there, they immediately ask him to assist in the investigation.

The unraveling of the mystery really doesn’t involve any surprises, and it boils down to carefully accounting for where every single person is from as soon as the curtain drops on the play to the murder itself. Ms. Marsh has a lot of fun with the larger-than-life personalities in the troupe, as well as spending some time describing the natural beauty of New Zealand.

She also touches on race relations through the character of Dr. Rangi Te Pokiha, a Maori man who was educated at Oxford and is conflicted between his respect for British culture and his love of his native heritage. He is another guest at the dinner, and he graciously dismisses some very insensitive comments made by some of the actors. He and Alleyn become friends when Alleyn buys a tiki – a small sacred statue – from him to give to Carolyn Dacres as a birthday present. This tiki will play a significant role in cracking the case.

I had a somewhat hard time following the explanation of how the murder was committed, because it involved the layout of the theater, and a floorplan would have been very helpful! That said, Inspector Alleyn catches the culprit, and he is able to resume his vacation. I’ve enjoyed all five of Ngaio Marsh’s mystery novels very much, but I would not rank Vintage Murder at the top. The detective work is fairly pedestrian, and none of the characters are particularly arresting. However, for a nice, leisurely and enjoyable read, it will fill the bill.

Christopher Morley’s The Haunted Bookshop

Book number 59 of 2024

The Haunted Bookshop is the sequel to Parnassus On Wheels, which I reviewed here. That book was the quirky and fun tale of a middle-aged farmwoman, Helen McGill, who left her farm and brother to sell books to other rural folk from a mobile, horse-drawn bookstore. The theme of the novel was that anyone can appreciate a good book, given the opportunity. Roger Mifflin was the eccentric little man who sold her the bookstore, named Parnassus.

Roger and Helen return in The Haunted Bookshop, happily married and running a bookshop called Parnassus at Home on Gissing Street, in Brooklyn. There is sign explaining why it’s haunted:

This shop is haunted by the ghosts
Of all great literature, in hosts;
We sell no fakes or trashes.
Lovers of books are welcome here,
No clerks will babble in your ear,
Please smoke— but don’t drop ashes!

Christopher Morley. The Haunted Bookshop (Kindle Locations 69-73). Standard Ebooks. Kindle Edition.

It is filled to the ceiling with used books, and Roger hosts meetings of fellow booksellers from all over New York City. One evening, a young ad salesman, Aubrey Gilbert, stops in to see if Roger would be interested in running ads for his store. Roger declines, but invites him to stay for dinner, since Helen is staying with family in Boston. They hit it off, and Aubrey mentions that one of his accounts is for Chapman’s Daintybits Prunes. George Chapman is also a book lover, who has asked Roger to give his daughter, Titania, a job in his bookshop so she can learn what real life is like. She has been to finishing school, so as a result knows nothing!

While Roger and Aubrey are having a leisurely meal, a customer comes in, asking for a copy of Carlyle’s Cromwell. Roger is sure he has a copy, but when he goes to where it should be, it isn’t there. A little later, while he is dusting the shelves, there is the copy of Cromwell, right where it should be! Meanwhile, Helen returns from Boston and Titania arrives. The Mifflins have fixed up the spare room for her, and she is delighted to begin a career “in literature”. Roger tells Helen about the case of the Cromwell, and when he goes to show her, it’s gone again! Titania picks up the New York Times, and in the Lost and Found section there is this ad:

Lost – Copy of Thomas Carlyle’s Oliver Cromwell between Gissing Street, Brooklyn, and the Octagon Hotel. If found before midnight, Tuesday, Dec. 3, return to assistant chef, Octagon Hotel.

That evening, Aubrey stops by to tell Roger about the ad and the fact that he dined at the Octagon with George Chapman. He also mentions that when he was in the elevator, a chef got in, carrying a copy of Cromwell! Aubrey also meets the beautiful Titania, with predictable results.

Thus begins an entertaining mystery involving a strange copy of Carlyle’s Cromwell, messages sent via Lost and Found notices, and other odd occurrences. Aubrey finds himself a target of a dastardly gang of German spies hellbent on blowing up President Woodrow Wilson as he travels to Europe to negotiate the peace. Meanwhile, Titania enjoys working at the Haunted Bookshop enormously, even if she is blissfully unaware of the danger she is in.

While the plot of The Haunted Bookshop is an improvement over that of Parnassus On Wheels, in The Haunted Bookshop Morley has an unfortunate tendency to use characters to expound his personal opinions to the reader. The Haunted Bookshop was published in 1919, immediately after the World War I Armistice, and Morley certainly had strong feelings about how that conflict occurred and how the peace should be concluded. That’s understandable, but to have Roger Mifflin pontificate for paragraph after paragraph gets tiresome. Morley even devotes an entire chapter to a letter Roger writes in which he expresses his admiration for books, booksellers, and President Wilson, and the role they will play in the new world that is certain to arise from the ashes of The Great War. I found myself wanting Morley to get back to the story at hand, because it was a pretty good one.

On balance, The Haunted Bookshop isn’t a profound work by any stretch of the imagination, but it is a fairly fun adventure tale. It’s too bad that whenever things start to get interesting, Morley chooses to veer off into opinionating. Parnassus On Wheels is the better novel, and you won’t be missing much if you skip this one.

Ngaio Marsh’s The Nursing Home Murder

Book number 56 of 2024

One of my best discoveries of 2024 has been the classic mysteries of New Zealander Ngaio Marsh. Her character, Roderick Alleyn is a cultured, intelligent, and witty police detective who gets better with every book. The Nursing Home Murder is the third novel in which Alleyn appears. It was published in 1935.

It begins with the British Home Secretary, Derek O’Callaghan, suffering from sporadic attacks of abdominal pain. He is also receiving death threats in the mail from people who are opposed to his politics. On top of that, his marriage is on the rocks, and his best friend, the eminent surgeon Sir John Phillips, is spitting nails at him because O’Callaghan had a weekend fling with one of his nurses whom he (Phillips) is madly in love with.

O’Callaghan’s pain gets worse until he faints during a session of Parliament, and he is rushed to the nearest nursing home (i.e. hospital) with acute peritonitis. Just as he’s going under before his emergency surgery, he realizes that the surgeon is none other than Sir John Phillips, and one of the assisting nurses is Jane Harden, the woman whom O’Callaghan spurned after that quickie affair. She has been sending him letters demanding he do right by her, and they have been getting more and more desperate in tone. The other assisting nurse, Miss Banks, is a rabid Bolshevik who considers O’Callaghan an enemy of the proletariat. Not a situation to inspire confidence in one’s medical treatment!

O’Callaghan does not survive his surgery, and it falls on Chief Detective-Inspector Alleyn’s shoulders to figure out, first, if a murder has been committed, and if so, who did it. The problem is there are too many suspects, each with a plausible motive and means. Sir John Phillips, Nurse Jane Harden, and Nurse Banks are all on record saying they despise O’Callaghan and wish him dead. All three were present in the operating room when something fishy happened with some injections O’Callaghan was given. And all three give slightly conflicting accounts of what happened during the surgery. In the wings is O’Callaghan’s wife, Cicely, who was well aware of his philandering and had no love for him. To top things off, O’Callaghan’s sister, Ruth, gave him a quack remedy for his pain before he fainted in Parliament. It might have contained a fatal dose of some drug.

An interesting glimpse into the scientific thought of 1930s Europe is a mention of Dr. Roberts’ – the anesthetist for O’Callaghan –  involvement in eugenics:

After an appreciative glance at the picture, Alleyn walked over to the bookcase, where he found a beguiling collection of modern novels, a Variorum Shakespeare that aroused his envy, and a number of works on heredity, eugenics and psycho-analysis. Among these was a respectable-looking volume entitled Debased Currency, by Theodore Roberts. Alleyn took it out and looked at the contents. They proved to be a series of papers on hereditary taints. Roberts evidently had read them at meetings of the International Congress on Eugenics and Sex Reform.

Marsh, Ngaio. The Nursing Home Murder: Inspector Roderick Alleyn #3 (pp. 121-122). Felony & Mayhem Press. Kindle Edition.

I was happy to see that the journalist and friend of Alleyn, Nigel Bathgate, returns in The Nursing Home Murder, as well as Bathgate’s now-fiancée, Angela North. They make a humorous cameo as deputized undercover agents in a secret meeting of British Bolsheviks. Also returning is Alleyn’s taciturn assistant, Inspector Fox, whom Alleyn refers to as “Brer Fox”. Marsh makes a few references to her two earlier mystery novels, A Man Lay Dead, and  Enter a Murderer, but one needn’t have read them to enjoy this one.

All in all, The Nursing Home Murder is a well-crafted mystery novel, without a lot of drama. Alleyn methodically reconstructs the crime and eventually uncovers the culprit. The one disturbing element is the eugenics mentioned above that reappears several times. Alleyn professes admiration for Roberts’ advocacy of sterilization and culling humanity of “tainted” stock, and I hope he is doing that merely to humor a suspect. Thankfully, that whole philosophy has been discredited and discarded.