Marsh manages to describe their activities credibly without creating a drag on the narrative.Īnd there is Inspector Fox. Beyond Alleyn himself, there are Thompson and Bailey the fingerprint and photography guys, and Curtis the pathologist, and the coroner, and the Chief Constable, etc. So much of the procedure following a homicide, is, I think more accurately depicted in Marsh’s works. and not a private detective (like Poirot) or a more-perceptive-than-usual elderly spinster (like Miss Marple). Marsh set herself a harder task than Christie from the beginning as well, in that Alleyn is an actual member of the C.I.D. The puzzles and solutions are compelling, Chief Inspector Alleyn makes a very interesting protagonist (and the secondary characters are generally well defined), and her writing is vivid and descriptive without being pretentious. Many of the secondhand paperbacks I read feature this sentence from some New York Times book review: “She writes better than Christie.” And it’s true – even in her early books you can see the sophistication behind the plotting, the characters, the sentence structure. Most of the ones I read were from her earlier output in the late 1930s and early to mid-1940s, though I did read several from the 50s and 60s, and finished up my spree with When in Rome (published in 1970). As I mentioned earlier, I read quite a lot of Ngaio Marsh mysteries in late December and into the holiday break (I said 10 in the earlier post, but after a recount it was actually 14).
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