The Eternal City and eternal human vice: When in Rome (Marsh)

 Ngaio Marsh. When in Rome (1970) Alleyn is in Rome working with the Italian police on international drug-smuggling. Focus of interest is a British citizen, Sebastian Mailer, aka Il Cicerone, his moniker as a tour guide for what we nowadays call “curated” excursions to the more obscure attractions of the city. Alleyn joins the tour. Mailer turns up dead. Alleyn investigates with and in parallel to the Italian cops. The solution is ambiguous: Alleyn knows who killed Mailer, but the snaring of a few important drug-dispensing crooks makes that solution a footnote.
     An above average Marsh. I enjoyed the wry observations on the sleazier aspects of international tourism, and Marsh’s slick use of stereotypes to propel the plot. This novel would make a good TV thriller-cum-travel advertisement. A radio dramatisation is available online. ***

Christmas in the country, a diplomatic incident, and a mistake in a cemetery: Three more by Marsh.

I;m reaching the end of my re-reading of Marsh's books. Here are three n more reviews.

 

Ngaio Marsh. Tied Up in Tinsel (1972) It’s Christmas Season at Halberds Manor. Hilary Bill-Tasman, its proprietor, has collected a troupe of distinguished guests, including Troy. Collection of rarities is his passion. He has hired paroled murderers as his servants. So when his uncle’s manservant ends up dead, they appear to be the prime suspects. Alleyn, Fox & Co. of course prove otherwise,. We’re treated to another of Marsh’s reliably entertaining confections, an once again the comedie humaine is the focus of her narrative. Caste and class cause ructions, family secrets obscure the trail, personal quirks and shame prevent candid testimony. Well-done, with plausible psychology animating both the guilty and the innocent. Average for Marsh, hence **½
 

 

 

 

Ngaio Marsh. Black as He’s Painted (1974)
Bartholomew Opala, erstwhile classmate of Alleyn’s, now President of Ng’ombwana, an obscure but important African nation, barely escapes assassination at a lavish entertainment designed to publicise the excellent effects of his politics. Samuel Whipplestone, a retired Foreign Office civil servant with African expertise, helps Alleyn. Lucy Lockett, a small stray black cat, not only captures the heart of Samuel, but leads to the crucial clue that unravels the knot. A well-done puzzle, a handful of characters that break the boundaries of their stereotypes, and a cast of villains that suffer satisfyingly poetic justice, combine to make up a better than average Marsh. Entertaining read, especially if you like cats. ***

 

 

 

Ngaio Marsh Grave Mistake (1978) The title alludes to the exhumation that provides the final link in the chain of proof. The setting is an English village of the type that exists only in detective novels, but which nevertheless resonates with the ring of truth. Class and the desire for respectability, enough locally provided services and goods, traditional community organisations shaping and regulating people’s lives, polite refusal to acknowledge the secrets that everybody knows, all these and more create an abstract idealisation of England that no longer exists but still exerts enormous influence. Property is valuable, inheritances matter, old relationships between families have to be respected, and so on. And polite reticence and unwillingness to pry allows people to pretend to be what they are not.
     Like other Golden Age detective novelists, Marsh sketches what was then contemporary life. Her novels have now become historical novels, a kind that any current author could not achieve. I enjoyed this reread. Above average for Marsh. ***

Imagine a Bird (poem)

I hope there's no paywall to prevent you reading this article in the New York Times:

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/29/opinion/eliot-waste-land-poetry.html

My response to it is this poem, which I wrote in 2014. (Yes, the photo at the bottom is of a cardinal). 

 

Imagine a bird

The backyard, mud and snow, sad grey-green grass.
Imagine a bird impossibly red in this monochrome landscape.

I remember a woman in a red coat
surrounded by schoolboys in blue blazers.

Words spill from me,
cadence and echo carving time.

I want to paint an impossibly red robin
ablaze in the dimming light.

 (Copyright W Kirchmeir 2014) 

 

 

 

 

A misdirected letter, a valuable glove, and art forgery: Three more by Marsh

Ngaio Marsh. Hand in Glove (1962) Mr Period Pyke, careful with his money, can afford two servants. He spends his time keeping up with the social life of his upper middle class acquaintances, sending condolences and congratulations as appropriate. This time, the envelopes are mixed up, and the condolences arrive before the death, which turns out to be a murder discovered during a treasure hunt. Mix in an art forgery scam (of Troy’s paintings), assorted other malfeasance, stupidity, and secrets both guilty and not, and Alleyn’s work is cut out for him. The usual mix of social comedy, romance, and acute character observation make this a pleasure to read. The title refers to the glove tat is te killer's undoing.

     Marsh is underrated in my opinion. This book is episode six in the TV series. ***

 

Ngaio Marsh. Death at the Dolphin (1967) [Killer
Dolphin, 1966, in the USA] Peregrine Jay restores the decaying Dolphin Theatre with the patronage of the oil millionaire who owns the property. On the opening night of the first play there’s a murder very like the one that closed down the theatre many years before. Alleyn happens to attend, so of course has to take on the investigation.
     The cast and conflicts resemble the earlier one. Perhaps Marsh decided to rework the earlier tale, or perhaps she just wanted to indulge in writing about theatre, which she does very well. I read the theatre cases as much for insight into that wonderful business of make-believe as for the crime puzzle and the social comedy.
     As usual, there’s a romance, this time between the young playwright whose play about Shakespeare affords the opportunity to showcase a glove made by Shakespeare’s father. It’s the theft of this glove that leads to murder. Satisfying read. ***

Ngaio Marsh. Clutch of Constables (1968) On a whim. Troy decides to join a river cruise to fill in the time between a completed commission and  Alleyn’s return from Australia. Thus she becomes a witness to murder. There’s also art-forgery and drug running. The perp is the Jampot, man who manages to blend into whatever milieu affords opportunities for his crimes. All the bits and piece fit together into a satisfying picture of crime, there are nicely done satiric vignettes of American and other tourists, and an ambience of leisurely river cruising so well done that occasionally it verges on tedium.
     No one is who or what they seem (even Troy tries to hide her identity), so solving the puzzle becomes a problem in teasing out the incompatible falsehoods among the many (and mostly irrelevant) truths. Alleyn reappears just in time, and all ends well and poetically just. ***

Wierd News: Fortean Times

 

Fortean Times (1990s) Back in the days when drugstores still had magazine racks, the regional distributor placed Fortean Times on ours. I bought every copy I found, accumulating about two dozen issues. The magazine, published in England (where else?), printed a mix of strange news, commentary ranging from the simplistically credulous to the shrewdly analytical, and reviews of books and other media dealing with UFOs, lake monsters, ghosts, and other such phenomena that people wish were facts but almost never are. The editors took a determinedly anti-debunking stand, which led them to accept eyewitness reports as evidence. A more sceptical stance would have served them better, but  I suspect that then the circulation among the credulous would have suffered.
     We see what we expect to see, which includes not seeing what we don’t expect to see. We identify objects based on past experience and current expectations, which means that the unexpected and unfamiliar are usually misidentified. Even trained observers suffer from this failing, and perhaps more so, because they are, after all, trained to identify certain objects. The misidentification becomes seriously problematic when we mistake people’s intentions and attitudes because we are unfamiliar with their idiosyncrasies, or psychological differences, or culturally shaped behaviours.
     The attached cover image of issue 100 accurately represents the style, tone and stance of the magazine in its artwork, typefaces, and headlines. It tried to emulate Charles Fort’s attitude to science, which was generally dismissive, on the grounds that scientists too often refused to acknowledge the existence of phenomena they couldn’t classify, and that therefore their explanations were generally bunkum.
     Yet most of Fort’s objections were the result of his ignorance or misunderstanding of basic science. If he didn’t understand some scientific explanation, it must be nonsense. Unfortunately, this attitude is shared by too many of the contributors to this magazine. Their naive acceptance of eye-witness accounts and memory as reliable data is especially sad. A more accurate knowledge of how our perceptions and memories fail to report reality accurately would have made many of their articles better. They would also have lacked anything resembling solutions to the puzzles, and it was those solutions that the magazine often purported to offer. The fact is that most of the evidence that isn’t fraud is evidence only of someone’s experience of something they did not or could not understand. The proper response in most of these cases is, “There’s not enough factual detail, so we will never know.”
     Still, an entertaining read every time. It’s still available. I visited their website, and on the blog found the same mix of fascination with weirdness and credulous acceptance of the standard explanations. To subscribers it promises a menu of “the most fantastic phenomena on earth”. No hint that many of these phenomena exist only in the minds and imaginations of the witnesses who didn’t (and often couldn’t) know what they were looking at. But there is the occasional more common sense attitude to “reports” of what “seems to have happened”, which I guess is an improvement. **

Building an HO scale Locomotive from Wood

Building an HO scale Locomotive from Wood and Card

(Model Railroader, May 1972)

Back in the days before CAD/CAM and cheap injection molding, model locomotives of specific prototypes were rare. The makers in Japan and Korea supplied limited numbers made with brass. The first examples in the late 1940s and early 1950s were cheap, but by 1972 quality had improved and prices had risen to two to four weeks average pay. Most modellers made do with repainted cheaper mass-market models that were “close enough”. These cost a couple of days pay. Adding details representing a particular railway’s house style helped the illusion. But if you wanted something as close as possible to your favourite road’s engines, you had to scratchbuild.

Culling masses of obsolete paper recently, I came across an article by A. E. Sima Jr (aka Bud Sima). He described how his poor soldering skills prompted him to try his hand using wood and card for building a locomotive. He wanted a model of the Maryland & Pennsylvania’s heavy Consolidation (2-8-0) steam engine. He bought a Varney 2-8-0 to adapt, but when he took it apart in preparation for repainting, the boiler casting encountered the basement floor at a high speed and broke. Bud was left with a mechanism. He decided to make a locomotive body to fit.

The article describes how he did it. He drilled out a suitable piece of wood dowel (to make space for the weight), and cut out a space at one end so it would fit over the motor. He cut cab sides from sheetwood, but did use sheet brass for the cab roof. He made some details with wood, card, wire, and sheet brass, and bought others. In those days, several manufacturers offered dozens of details such as bells, smokestacks, feedwater heaters, steps, brake cylinders, and so on. The tender body was cut from a block of wood and wrapped in card. A dress snap made the electrical connection between tender and locomotive. So “for a surprisingly small outlay of cash”, Bud got what he wanted. I’m sure he inspired others to try their hand at scratchbuilding too. Model Railroader helpfully reprinted its plans and photos of the Ma & Pa locomotive.

Bud writes in a friendly conversational style. The photos and diagrams are adequate for the purpose. Nowadays, we would see a bulleted step by step description, with more photos. Anyone who’s put together a handful of kits would have little trouble emulating Bud’s project. The modern builder would use plastic tube and sheet material instead of wood. There are far fewer details parts available, so fabricating them might be a major challenge. Even so, Bud’s article could be just the inspiration needed. It’s available online for any subscriber to Model Railroader’s online services.

I enjoyed re-reading Bud’s story. ***

Murder at Winter Solstice, on the High Seas, and in the Theatre: Three by Marsh

 

Ngaio Marsh. Off With His Head (1958) A Mrs Bünz, fan of English folklore, arrives at Mardian village in order to observe the Seven Swords Dance, a mummery exhibited every Winter Solstice further back then human memory can reach. The granddaughter of William Andersen, ignorantly cruel patriarch of the family that performs the ritual, also arrives. Her goal is some kind of reconciliation on behalf of her mother, who ran off with a Catholic count, thus offending both William’s class-snobbery and Chapel religionism.
     The murder is apparently impossible, but Alleyn and his team winkle out the truth in this neatly plotted and sometimes insightful novel. There’s a good deal of by-the-way information about mummery, Morris dancing, the Green man, etc, and bucolic mores (some of it rather stereotypical). Marsh provides a nice mix of romance and psychology, but she doesn’t give herself room for the nuanced character building that makes most of her work such a pleasant read, so I give this merely a **½

Ngaio Marsh. Singing in the Shrouds (1958) A serial killer has murdered three times. He leaves flower petals and a broken string of pearls on the victims, and has been heard singing nearby. When his most recent victim is found clutching part of an embarkation notice for the Cape Farewell, Alleyn must join the cruise as a supposed VIP connection to the ship’s owners. A murder does ensue, but the killer’s vanity undoes him. Since he was an obnoxious ass, poetic justice feels right.
     The puzzle is, as usual, fairly presented and solved. Since Brer Fox is unavailable, Alleyn must rely on the mulish Captain and the ship’s doctor for help. He writes letters to Troy to give him space for rumination. The passengers are a nice collection of sly riffs on stereotypes. Romance blossoms (Marsh has a soft spot for young lovers). Freudian theories of childhood trauma’s effects on adult neuroses explain the murderer’s motives, but that doesn’t reduce the pleasure of re-reading this book. Marsh is a novelist who uses the crime genre to muse on the comedie humaine. Thus one’s average for her, which makes it a *** .

 

Ngaio Marsh. False Scent (1960) Another of Marsh’s theatrical excursions. Mary Bellamy, a narcissistic actress, who occupies the centre of her world and hence, she believes, of the Universe, is the victim. She’s of course made more than enough enemies, so Alleyn and Fox’s task is that of removing the innocents cluttering the path to the solution.
     A beautifully complex network of family, personal, business and professional relationships, and the usual withholding of essential information delay the investigation, and also mislead the reader (me). As so often in Marsh’s work, an obsession provides the motive. A satisfying read. ***