Night at the Vulcan by Ngaio Marsh
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I think she wanted to write a novel about a play much more than one about solving a mystery. Or, maybe I’ll say it this way: She seems to have enjoyed tying the knot much more than loosing it. Even just judging by page numbers, the detective doesn’t show up until very late in the book.
It’s about these characters getting into terrible trouble with each other and burying it, everybody hiding what’s really going on beneath layer and layer of camouflage until the whole little tribe of the play is like a sarcophagus full of dead bones long before the dude actually gets murdered.
One particularly nice revelation is that the heroine of the rags-to-riches side of the tale isn’t quite as she appears, so that in the beginning you think, oh, cheesy, a rags-to-riches tale, and it turns out that that angle on the story is more camouflage. Which is nice.
And it’s about Art, of course, because nothing is as it seems in the theater, and nothing is as it seems in a murder mystery. Quite nice.
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