Book
Enter a Murderer by Ngaio Marsh
Series
Second book in the Roderick Alleyn series of detective stories
Synopsis
Journalist Nigel Bathgate is attending a play in the West End that’s starring a casual friend of his, and he’s invited his new acquaintance Chief Inspector Alleyn to tag along. A climactic moment in the play has the star shooting another character at point-blank range, a character who was played by a detestable actor who’d somehow managed to threaten, blackmail, or antagonize every other member of the production. But tonight, the scene ends in tragedy, as someone has swapped the gun’s dummy bullets for the real thing!
Notes
I read Ngaio Marsh’s first murder mystery earlier this year, and while I thought it was fun and engaging, I felt like I could barely make sense of it. The characters all had a rapport that felt a lot more modern than I’m used to seeing in works from the 1930s, but the language was full of idioms and references I didn’t recognize, and even their behavior seemed alien.
Enter a Murderer feels like an author who’s more confident and self-assured in her characters’ charm — I’ve read it suggested that part of that was because Marsh was familiar with the workings of theater and felt most at home in that setting — but I had an even harder time making sense of what I was reading.
The characters are clever and endearingly sarcastic, making the dialogue feel snappy and sophisticated, until one of them makes a reference that was completely impenetrable to me. I felt like a reverse Captain America, having to end every few paragraphs saying, “I did not understand that reference.”
Which wouldn’t be too bad, if the language didn’t often extend into the descriptions of what was happening. There are long stretches where Marsh describes people moving through the backstage areas of theater, or even around areas of London, and it was absolutely impossible for me to form a mental image of any of it. Characters kept doing or saying things that seemed as if they were supposed to be loaded with significance, but nothing was sparking any kind of connection for me. When we finally got the resolution of the mystery, my reaction was simply, “Okay, sure.”
There was a short-lived sketch comedy show called The New Show, and one of its most memorable sketches was called “Floont Artney, Private Eye.” The gag of the sketch was that it was a standard detective story in every way, except that all of the characters had bizarre names. Marsh’s books feel a little like that to me, when a character has a name like “Arthur Surbonadier” and it’s treated with little comment. (It’s not even the character’s real name!)
Verdict
It’s pretty fun and engaging, in that I never hated reading it. But this is going to be my last attempt at reading Ngaio Marsh for a while. I’m used to having to read Agatha Christie’s mysteries while constantly translating back and forth between my time period and England of the 30s and 40s; reading Marsh’s mysteries, I feel as if I’m having to translate not just from the 1930s to the 2020s, but from English to some weird alien language, and back to English again.