Enter a Murderer

"I came to Ngaio Marsh very late. I didn’t fully realize that during the golden age in Britain and its dominions—which included New Zealand at that time—the great authors were all women. Whereas in America they were all men: Raymond Chandler , Dashiell Hammett . Raymond Chandler hated British crime writing. He wrote this very funny article about how the books always had titles like Inspector Pinchbottle to the Rescue or Death Wears Yellow Garters . He said, “The English may not always be the best writers in the world, but they are incomparably the best dull writers.” He was setting himself up as the hard-boiled answer to the female writers in Britain he didn’t like, which included Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, Margery Allingham (who is also brilliant) and Ngaio Marsh. I’d never read Ngaio Marsh at all until about a year ago. Her inspector is brilliant. He’s called Roderick Alleyn. He’s very wry. He’s highly educated and is constantly quoting Shakespeare . He’s got a lovely relationship with his colleagues in Scotland Yard. Ngaio Marsh had a lot of experience in the theatre, so quite a lot of her novels are set there, including this one. She’s very good on what actors were like in the 1920s and 30s. They were horrors, many of them. The idea of the awful luvvie is brilliant in these books. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . She is a very good example of a golden age, classical problem-solving detective writer, like Agatha Christie. The murder took place in a theatre: here’s a plan of the theatre, here is where all the people were. How can that person have got to there in time to do the murder? But her book is enlivened by the theatre stuff, which is very well-experienced and very funny. It’s beautifully written. Also, I think what you need in all of these books is at least one character who rises off the page. She came up with a detective who was very dry and funny and whimsical. The whimsy that you get in this novel is there in all of them. Have you read any Ngaio Marsh? I think she gets lost in the mix because when you think of golden age writers you think of Agatha Christie first and Dorothy Sayers second. Not everyone would say Marjorie Allingham and even fewer Ngaio Marsh. I think it might be the problem-solving. I’ve read several of hers and they’re not all brilliant, because sometimes the crimes are too complicated. I don’t like over-complicated crime novels because they can get very dense, where the problem is everything. In mine, I wrote everything over the shoulder of the main character, my detective. Everything that he sees and experiences you see and experience as the reader. Whereas a lot of these writers, including Marsh, dance around and you see several different perspectives and you look over the shoulder of different people. Then it’s quite hard, sometimes, to piece together precisely where everyone was. They’re not very modern, in that sense. The modern lack of an attention span suffers in some of her novels. I really liked it. Roderick Alleyn is very good in it. There is a journalist character in it. He’s a Watson-like figure who shouldn’t really be there but writes down what Alleyn says and listens to him being witty. It’s amazing how all of these books mention Sherlock Holmes. I find it absolutely amazing that Conan Doyle both invented this genre and represented its high watermark. Most people who love these books would still say that the best creation ever was the first one. We’ve all been scrabbling around for 130 years, but Sherlock Holmes is still the best."