Tied Up in Tinsel

"Tied Up In Tinsel is actually one of Marsh’s later novels. She published her first in 1934 during the golden age but she then lived into the 1980s and kept writing in a similar style throughout her life. This one is from 1972 and sees her regular Scotland Yard sleuth, Roderick Alleyn, drawn into a country house murder mystery after someone disappears from the house party. Just to add extra spice to the case, many of the servants at this house are convicted murderers who have served their time and been released — altruism or cunning scheme? The reader must decide! Marsh was a huge theatre enthusiast and a celebrated director of amateur and university Shakespeare productions in her native New Zealand. She brought some of this dramatic expertise into her detective fiction, with plenty of her novels featuring actors or plays in some way, and I think she did some of her best writing about this setting. My particular favourites are Enter a Murderer , in which an actor is shot dead on stage during a performance by what was supposed to be a dummy gun, and Overture to Death , which is about an extraordinary murder among the actors in a parish play in rural Dorset."