Overture to Death & Death at the Bar (2 book reviews)

Ngaio Marsh Overture to Death (1939) Set-up: a village in which two aging spinsters compete for the Vicar’s attentions, while interfering in everybody else’s life. Murder: at the beginning of an amateur play, produced as a fund-raiser for the parish’s youth group, when one of them is shot by a pistol connected to the soft-pedal of the piano on which she will play the “overture”. Denouement: psychologically based, far-fetched by current standards because it involves Freudian repressions and such. Characters: believable enough as stereotypes, used by Marsh to make sometimes cutting observations about religion, charity, hypocrisy, naivete, and so on. One of her sharper satires. The novel reminds me of a drawing room comedy written as social critique, a genre very popular in the 1930s (see Noel Coward’s plays). The  “modern” play is chosen against the wishes of the spinsters. Detection: focus primarily on Alleyn and Fox, with a letter to Troy inserted to keep that back-story going. Overall effect: another good Marsh, who in my opinion is under-rated by detection story fans that concentrate too much on the puzzle. **½

Ngaio Marsh Death at the Bar (1939) The title is a rather lame pun: A lawyer is murdered in the
private bar of the pub in a small fishing village. The puzzle is more intricate than usual, and the characters are as nicely done as ever. This is Marsh as professional crime writer: the book is strictly formula, well-done, with enough incidental detail to provide the pleasures of living in a familiar fictional world. I’m not much of a puzzle solver when I read detective fiction, so the feel of the imagined world is important to me. I like Marsh’s version of English village life, and I like Alleyn, despite his sometimes irritating facetiousness. Or maybe because of it. There’s also enough contemporary detail to give us something of the feel of the times, such as a left-wing association  with an endearingly irrelevant run of Marxist jargon. **½