Ngaio Marsh
I apologize for the brief hiatus. I do intend to be more regular.
Someone recently asked me to recommend a "classic mystery novel." I had a harder time with that than I would have expected, because the most memorable ones are often those that somehow bend the genre--Christie's Murder of Roger Ackroyd or Murder on the Orient Express, or Hammett's Maltese Falcon. The book I settled on, finally, was Singing in the Shrouds by Dame Ngaio Marsh (that's pronounced "Nigh-oh" by the folks who produce the audiobooks). Naio Marsh gets my vote for "the best mystery author you're not reading," and I'd like to encourage you all to try her books. They've been re-released in America in paperback fairly recently, so they're possible to acquire.
Shrouds is, rather unusally for Marsh or her contemporaries, about a serial killer. It takes place on board a cruise ship bound for Africa; the police have learned that the "Flower Murderer," who leaves flower petals on his victems, may be on board so Inspector Roderick Alleyn (pronounced "Allen") boards the boat and spends the book trying to figure out which of the passengers is his killer. The book has the claustrophobic atmosphere typical of early mysteries, many of which feature oceanic voyages. Although Marsh writes with sensibilities not shared by most modern readers, her biases are not as off-putting as Josephine Tey's.
Alleyn shows up quite early in this book, which isn't always the case in Marsh--she often spends the first third of the novel setting up the characters involved, then introduces the crime and the detective. Normally, this would annoy me, since I read dectective series primarily because (and if) I like the detective. However, her vibrant prose and her interesting characters pull me along anyway, even if Alleyn is offstage. I use that metaphor deliberately, since Marsh was a well-known Shakespearean producer, and several of her novels center around theaters and/or plays. She was also a painter, and one of her novels, Artists in Crime, deals with a painting school. Artists may be my second favorite of her books, but it's hard to choose since I like them all (although her very last book, Light Thickens, is not up to the rest of the series--she didn't even live to see it published, I think).
A word of warning--many of her books were published under more than one title (I assume they had different names in the U.S. and in Britain). A Surfeit of Lampreys is also called Death of a Peer; Killer Dolphin and Death at the Dolphin are the same book. This can make it hard to buy them on-line, since you need to see a plot summary to be certain you haven't read it before.
OK, now, hands up--who's going to have half a jar of mincemeat left over after Thanksgiving? Here's a recipe that will use up the leftovers: Chicken Curry in a Hurry
Someone recently asked me to recommend a "classic mystery novel." I had a harder time with that than I would have expected, because the most memorable ones are often those that somehow bend the genre--Christie's Murder of Roger Ackroyd or Murder on the Orient Express, or Hammett's Maltese Falcon. The book I settled on, finally, was Singing in the Shrouds by Dame Ngaio Marsh (that's pronounced "Nigh-oh" by the folks who produce the audiobooks). Naio Marsh gets my vote for "the best mystery author you're not reading," and I'd like to encourage you all to try her books. They've been re-released in America in paperback fairly recently, so they're possible to acquire.
Shrouds is, rather unusally for Marsh or her contemporaries, about a serial killer. It takes place on board a cruise ship bound for Africa; the police have learned that the "Flower Murderer," who leaves flower petals on his victems, may be on board so Inspector Roderick Alleyn (pronounced "Allen") boards the boat and spends the book trying to figure out which of the passengers is his killer. The book has the claustrophobic atmosphere typical of early mysteries, many of which feature oceanic voyages. Although Marsh writes with sensibilities not shared by most modern readers, her biases are not as off-putting as Josephine Tey's.
Alleyn shows up quite early in this book, which isn't always the case in Marsh--she often spends the first third of the novel setting up the characters involved, then introduces the crime and the detective. Normally, this would annoy me, since I read dectective series primarily because (and if) I like the detective. However, her vibrant prose and her interesting characters pull me along anyway, even if Alleyn is offstage. I use that metaphor deliberately, since Marsh was a well-known Shakespearean producer, and several of her novels center around theaters and/or plays. She was also a painter, and one of her novels, Artists in Crime, deals with a painting school. Artists may be my second favorite of her books, but it's hard to choose since I like them all (although her very last book, Light Thickens, is not up to the rest of the series--she didn't even live to see it published, I think).
A word of warning--many of her books were published under more than one title (I assume they had different names in the U.S. and in Britain). A Surfeit of Lampreys is also called Death of a Peer; Killer Dolphin and Death at the Dolphin are the same book. This can make it hard to buy them on-line, since you need to see a plot summary to be certain you haven't read it before.
OK, now, hands up--who's going to have half a jar of mincemeat left over after Thanksgiving? Here's a recipe that will use up the leftovers: Chicken Curry in a Hurry
posted by Rebecca Brackmann at 3:57 PM
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