Ngaio Marsh. A Man Lay Dead (1934) The first Alleyn novel. Pretty good puzzle, albeit with a murder method that’s a bit too contrived, and actually impossible. The setting is a country house whose owner gives fabulous weekend entertainments. This one is the game of Murder, and of course the corpse is really dead.
Alleyn isn’t much more than a talking head, but so are the other characters. Fairly placed clues and red herrings, with Fox and the other cops lending an air of verismilitudinous police procedure. Marsh never did pay much attention to procedure, though. Apart from photography, dusting for prints, and the collection of odd objects, mentioned but never well described, the forensics happen offstage. Nigel Bathgate, aspiring reporter, who figures in many of the early Alleyns, provides the admiring amateur foil. His admiration is not uncritical, however. The book ends on a more realistic note as Bathgate and Alleyn ride the train into Paddington. Bathgate’s romantic life gives us the necessary coda for every comic romance: love prevails.
Marsh wrote this book to see if she could make a plausible entertainment. She succeeded. In the 1920s and 30s there was a great demand for light reading to while away train and ocean journeys, and damp weekends. The crime puzzle was one of many genres supplying the market. Pretty well all the genres were translated into film and television over the next few decades, when those media became mass entertainment and needed a constant supply of product.
Alleyn develops into a much more complex human being in the later novels; Marsh’s talent for satire makes them social comedies hung on crime puzzle plots. I like Alleyn and his colleagues. I like the world they inhabit, a world looks and feels like the world I knew in England in the 1940s and 50s, but one in which justice is, inevitably, done. It’s a comforting fantasy. **
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