Death at the Bar by Ngaio Marsh

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Charming atmosphere, interesting cast of characters all of whom have a motive for murder, a tangle of interpersonal tensions just beneath the surface, a foolish chemist who gives out poisons that are far too strong and, of course, a fiendish plot.

What impresses me about Marsh’s mysteries is the care that goes into the settings and the characters. The world-building is impeccable. I don’t usually do a good job of caring about who the murderer is, as I do when reading Christie, but I care very much for the place and the people.

That’s really a big part of what a good novel does: it makes a place for you to go to. The tavern in this story is very much such a place. Reading it is like taking the perfect British summer vacation that the victim and most of the suspects were on when the fateful hour came.



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Artists in Crime by Ngaio Marsh

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


The best part of this novel is the detective’s mom. She’s super cool. Second is the romance, which is quite fun. Third is the horrific ways that people get killed in it. (One of them is, I think, pretty much exactly what people call ‘ironic’ but is not actually ironic. In an Alanis sort of way, you know?)

Oh, and the structure of the novel adheres to the traditional Christie form, which is a departure for Marsh, as far as I can tell, inasmuch as it includes the second murder that signals the beginning of the third act.

I would be remiss not to mention the humorous Australian, to whom the detective goes full Polonius with the fatherly advice in a way that one strongly suspects broke the fourth wall for some unlucky actual young reader. It’s a weird moment.



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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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Death of a Peer by Ngaio Marsh

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This is quite a fun mystery! And there’s a lot of pretty funny parts, too. I think Marsh must have known a family much like the Lampreys, in order to write their particular blend of personalities so well.

There’s a particularly hilarious scene where the (upper-crust) Lampreys are all in a room with a police officer, awaiting individual questioning, and they try to get their alibis straight speaking French to each other, assuming the low-class officer won’t understand. But they KNOW he writes in shorthand, which makes it very likely that he could write down what they’re saying phonetically and get somebody to translate it later. They can see how fast he writes. What are they thinking?

Oh, and he speaks French too.

And after that, there’s a more deeply funny moment when they get caught and it becomes apparent that the detective knows everything they’ve been saying the whole time. They shrug it off. No apology, no repentance, just a comment along the lines of, “Well, I guess we looked like jerks.” and then on to the next thing. Like water off a duck’s back. This is why they are what they are. They have achieved near-complete ironic detachment.



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