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What I've Finished Reading
Ngaio Marsh is hitting a quiet but enjoyable second stride late in her career. The investigative portion of these books is less sharp than in the old days -- I haven't really felt the dismaying thrill of an Alleyn interrogation for quite a while now -- but the pre-murder plots and settings have grown up thick and leisurely around it, and some of the intermittent clumsiness of the Spinsters in Jeopardy era is gone. It could just be that her formula is so familiar to me now that I've become numb even to its failures, but I don't think so. I think these are pretty good Marsh books. Plus, the combination of Golden Age mystery tropes with "with-it" characters and topics (as we creep up through the Seventies) is always fun to see, at least from way up here in the future.
Clutch of Constables was more or less timeless -- apart from a stray reference or two, and some of the interests of the resident Hysterical Spinster, it could have taken place at any point between about 1920-70. When in Rome, on the other hand, is very much A Tale of the Groovy Now. Successfully? probably not. Entertainingly? I would say yes. It's a drug story, involving the heroin and cocaine trade among English tourists in Rome, and a blackmail story independently of the drugs. I don't like drug stories generally, but I think it's actually a little better done than Marsh's earlier Reefer Madness mysteries of the thirties and forties. And Marsh provides a convincing in-story explanation for why the Plummy Colonel character is an anachronism! There's also an interestingly "shocking" reveal, and some mildly shocking (to me) behavior on Alleyn's part -- shocking for Alleyn, that is, not necessarily for your run-of-the-mill series detective.
Both these books were a lot of fun, for the most part. Marsh's apparent dislike of old ladies who are doing old-ladyhood wrong is a little strong in both, but that can't be helped at this point. The impeccable British-Ethiopian doctor in Constables provided an opportunity for the villains to do some racist puppy-kicking, something I'm not super fond of, but it could have been a lot worse.
What I'm Reading Now
Unlike Poirot, who can feel himself growing old as the present reels endlessly away beneath him, Alleyn never seems to age at all. That is, he gets a promotion every couple of books, and somewhere in there his son grew up enough to take trips on his own and have a "best girl," and every now and then (much more so in the past few books than before) someone will remember an old case and say, "Why, that must be twenty years ago!" But no one ever mentions how old he is, and he doesn't talk about it (he wouldn't, I guess), and everyone in the story reacts to him as if he were still the blandly dashing fortysomething of the 1930s. In Tied Up in Tinsel, for example, the Difficult Ingenue (who, as a representative of her generation, is involved with experimental nude theatre and says "you know" too much) makes a "dead set" at him and coos to Troy about how "simply the mostest" he is. Is he supposed to be literally eighty here, as the text keeps hinting with its references to past cases and how long ago they were, or still forty, or somewhere in between? It doesn't really matter. Alleyn is what he always was, only now. There's no hint of melancholy in his Detective Stasis -- not yet, anyway.
Tied Up in Tinsel is another of these good but slightly muted late Marshes. Like A Clutch of Constables, it begins with Troy on her own -- this time, she's painting an eccentric subject at his house over Christmas, where she learns how he solved the "servant problem" by staffing his old-school mansion entirely with murderers! Murderers of "the right sort," he explains -- those who killed once under extraordinary circumstances unlikely to be repeated -- are the safest kind of convict to have around the house, and ex-cons make for grateful and cheap labor! Can this brilliant plan possibly backfire?? Actually, I'm pretty sure the half-dozen household murderers are a blind and the real killer will turn out to be someone else.
I'm enjoying the increased frequency of Troy-centric books. You can always pretty much tell what's going to happen in a Troy-centric book: Troy will be dryly observant about some non-Troy characters, there will be some plausible-sounding technical musing about painting, Troy will be brought up short by the same four or five unanswerably ignorant questions from non-specialists and think something scathing, eventually murder will rescue her from the burden of being polite to her admirers (but not for at least a hundred pages!) and Alleyn will show up to be awkward and adorable for ten seconds before he gets down to genre business -- but it's always neatly done and entertaining.
What I Plan to Read Next
The sequel to The Last Detective, if it ever comes back to the library, plus whatever's next in the Marsh queue. Possibly also (or instead) The Gentle Axe, that Porfiry Petrovich mystery I mentioned a while back.
What I've Finished Reading
How strange, Troy thought as they drove away, that she should so sharply regret leaving the River. For a moment she entertained a notion that because of the violence that threaded its history there was something unremarkable, even appropriate, in the latest affront to the River. Poor Hazel Rickerby-Carrick, she thought, has joined a long line of drowned faces and tumbled limbs: Plantagenets and Frenchmen, Lancastrians and Yorkists, cropped, wigged and ringleted heads: bloated and desecrated bodies. They had drenched the fields and fed the River. The landscape had drawn them into itself and perhaps grown richer for them.
"I shall come back to the waterways," Troy thought. She and Alleyn and their son and his best girl might hire a longboat and cruise, not here, not between Tollardwark and Ramsdyke, but further south or west where there was no detergent on the waters. But it was extremely odd, all the same, that she should want to do so.
Ngaio Marsh is hitting a quiet but enjoyable second stride late in her career. The investigative portion of these books is less sharp than in the old days -- I haven't really felt the dismaying thrill of an Alleyn interrogation for quite a while now -- but the pre-murder plots and settings have grown up thick and leisurely around it, and some of the intermittent clumsiness of the Spinsters in Jeopardy era is gone. It could just be that her formula is so familiar to me now that I've become numb even to its failures, but I don't think so. I think these are pretty good Marsh books. Plus, the combination of Golden Age mystery tropes with "with-it" characters and topics (as we creep up through the Seventies) is always fun to see, at least from way up here in the future.
Clutch of Constables was more or less timeless -- apart from a stray reference or two, and some of the interests of the resident Hysterical Spinster, it could have taken place at any point between about 1920-70. When in Rome, on the other hand, is very much A Tale of the Groovy Now. Successfully? probably not. Entertainingly? I would say yes. It's a drug story, involving the heroin and cocaine trade among English tourists in Rome, and a blackmail story independently of the drugs. I don't like drug stories generally, but I think it's actually a little better done than Marsh's earlier Reefer Madness mysteries of the thirties and forties. And Marsh provides a convincing in-story explanation for why the Plummy Colonel character is an anachronism! There's also an interestingly "shocking" reveal, and some mildly shocking (to me) behavior on Alleyn's part -- shocking for Alleyn, that is, not necessarily for your run-of-the-mill series detective.
Both these books were a lot of fun, for the most part. Marsh's apparent dislike of old ladies who are doing old-ladyhood wrong is a little strong in both, but that can't be helped at this point. The impeccable British-Ethiopian doctor in Constables provided an opportunity for the villains to do some racist puppy-kicking, something I'm not super fond of, but it could have been a lot worse.
What I'm Reading Now
Unlike Poirot, who can feel himself growing old as the present reels endlessly away beneath him, Alleyn never seems to age at all. That is, he gets a promotion every couple of books, and somewhere in there his son grew up enough to take trips on his own and have a "best girl," and every now and then (much more so in the past few books than before) someone will remember an old case and say, "Why, that must be twenty years ago!" But no one ever mentions how old he is, and he doesn't talk about it (he wouldn't, I guess), and everyone in the story reacts to him as if he were still the blandly dashing fortysomething of the 1930s. In Tied Up in Tinsel, for example, the Difficult Ingenue (who, as a representative of her generation, is involved with experimental nude theatre and says "you know" too much) makes a "dead set" at him and coos to Troy about how "simply the mostest" he is. Is he supposed to be literally eighty here, as the text keeps hinting with its references to past cases and how long ago they were, or still forty, or somewhere in between? It doesn't really matter. Alleyn is what he always was, only now. There's no hint of melancholy in his Detective Stasis -- not yet, anyway.
Tied Up in Tinsel is another of these good but slightly muted late Marshes. Like A Clutch of Constables, it begins with Troy on her own -- this time, she's painting an eccentric subject at his house over Christmas, where she learns how he solved the "servant problem" by staffing his old-school mansion entirely with murderers! Murderers of "the right sort," he explains -- those who killed once under extraordinary circumstances unlikely to be repeated -- are the safest kind of convict to have around the house, and ex-cons make for grateful and cheap labor! Can this brilliant plan possibly backfire?? Actually, I'm pretty sure the half-dozen household murderers are a blind and the real killer will turn out to be someone else.
I'm enjoying the increased frequency of Troy-centric books. You can always pretty much tell what's going to happen in a Troy-centric book: Troy will be dryly observant about some non-Troy characters, there will be some plausible-sounding technical musing about painting, Troy will be brought up short by the same four or five unanswerably ignorant questions from non-specialists and think something scathing, eventually murder will rescue her from the burden of being polite to her admirers (but not for at least a hundred pages!) and Alleyn will show up to be awkward and adorable for ten seconds before he gets down to genre business -- but it's always neatly done and entertaining.
What I Plan to Read Next
The sequel to The Last Detective, if it ever comes back to the library, plus whatever's next in the Marsh queue. Possibly also (or instead) The Gentle Axe, that Porfiry Petrovich mystery I mentioned a while back.
