Book
A Man Lay Dead by Ngaio Marsh
Series
First book in the Roderick Alleyn series of detective stories
Synopsis
A wealthy Englishman has assembled a group of friends and associates to his mansion in the countryside for a party in which they’ll all take part in a mock murder. When someone takes advantage of the game to actually murder one of the guests with a ceremonial Mongolian dagger, it falls to Detective Chief-Inspector Roderick Alleyn of Scotland Yard to sort through the personal motives of the guests and the crime’s ties to a Russian secret society.
Notes
While I’ve been reading and re-reading a lot of Agatha Christie mysteries lately, I keep hearing the name Ngaio Marsh mentioned as one of Christie’s contemporaries. I was completely unfamiliar with her work, so I started with her first detective novel.
The Wikipedia entry mentions that Marsh was unhappy with her first novel as being implausible and shallow, but there’s a lot to like here. It’s odd reading it in 2025, though: it feels simultaneously modern and impenetrably of its time. I frequently found myself with no idea what was going on, because the idioms and the very behavior of the characters seemed so foreign to me. Not just as an American born 40 years after the book was published, but as somebody who’s always assumed I have a rough idea of how human beings act.
These characters alternate between being earnest and melodramatic (which I’d expected) and being bafflingly arch. They’re often casually cruel or rude to each other, and I felt like an alien trying to figure out if they were being wry or sincere. It seemed like the book was too modern. As a result, I was even less equipped to solve the mystery, since I was too baffled by the basics of what was actually happen to also be looking for obscure clues.
My other big criticism of this book is that it felt self-aware to the point of self-consciousness; characters frequently commented on the events as being well-worn tropes of detective stories, as if Marsh were a little too eager to establish to readers that she was in on the joke. All that said, I still enjoyed it a lot.
Verdict
Surprisingly modern, at times to a fault, but fun and engaging. It feels more sophisticated than what I’m used to for the genre, at least in its writing if not its central mystery. This is my first exposure to a book written by someone considered to be a master of the genre, so I’m looking forward to reading more of Marsh’s detective stories.