A Man Lay Dead by Ngaio Marsh

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


BOTTOM LINE: Thoroughly old-fashioned "good read!", with an aristo-detective, all the suspects gathered in A Great House for a weekend house party, a peculiar murder method, wild Bolsheviks complicating everything, family intrigues galore, an affable-but-dim Watson - what's not to like? First mystery novel (1934) from a now-classic author isn't challenging, brilliant, or particularly special, but is still entertaining, giving a hint of her good books yet to come and, as is usual with Marsh, there are nicely pointed sly digs here'n'there.



Nigel Bathgate's cousin Charles is a bit of a dog - loving the pursuit of ladies rather too much, he enjoys playing with fire, and gets burned, in many ways. He loses a girlfriend/possible wife (who truly loves him) while in pursuit of an already-married woman, whose current husband isn't much pleased. And while remaining rather likable (at least in callow Nigel's eyes) his superscilliousness and air of "I know better/all!" gets on not a few raw nerves during an extended house party. And not many are surprised when, in the course of A Murder Game, he winds up truly dead - and in a spectacular (how like Charles!!) fashion.



Enter Inspector Alleyn - obviously refined, very well-educated, extremely likable, his smooth demeanor hides a mildly tormented psyche, as he finds he must expose Nice People to the machinations of the police force and its subsequent events, some not at all well-mannered. With these attributes Alleyn, in Marsh's first novel, is quite ordinary, an oft-used character in popular novels of the time, and although in future novels he becomes a rather interesting personality with a fascinating backstory, in this his first recorded case he is quite traditional, and rather stodgy. And while in subsequent novels Marsh builds up the cast of regulars around Alleyn (especially the wonderful Mr. Fox), here he's pretty much the entire show, except for a funny local policeman named Bunce - yet another character that often shows up in mysteries from the 1920s and early 1930s.



The plotting, while good, is also quite ordinary for the period - a stilted setting, a twisted murder mystery with overlapping elements of several crimes, a bit of spy-thriller nonsense, some slight omnipotence from the police, and a thoroughly ludicrous bit of play-acting-cum-reconstruction of the crime at the end. But it's all very smoothly written, and while now a curiosity, at the time "this sort of thing" was quite popular.



Now considered one of the Queens of Crime of the period (along with Christie and Allingham), Marsh's first mystery is still enjoyable, if not special or especially thrilling.



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