1935 classic English detective fiction; third of Marsh's novels of
Inspector Roderick Alleyn. In a private hospital, the Home Secretary
was operated on for appendicitis: shortly afterwards he was dead,
poisoned with hyoscine (scopolamine). And all sorts of people seem to
have had motives.
Which is where it feels artificial. Yes, all right, Marsh does go
to some trouble to line things up, but when one of the three nurses
just happens to be the young woman the victim has dumped after a
fling, the surgeon is her prospective beau (and both of them have
threatened to kill him in front of witnesses), and another nurse is
a communist agitator (and he's bringing in a Bill which will make life
much harder for anarchists and communists, who are obviously the same
thing)… well, it all starts to feel a bit too much. Much as in Enter
a Murderer everything is carefully set up so that there are multiple
suspects, but while there everyone had at least been involved in the
play and known the victim through the natural course of events, here
it smells of forced coincidence and the lamp.
Making the victim the Home Secretary, while it does bring in the
communist angle, also feels excessive: oh yes, Alleyn knows the Prime
Minister. This angle does allow Nigel Bathgate, Alleyn's journalistic
Watson, into the story, since there's a big communist meeting going on
and it has to be infiltrated; but it feels as though Alleyn's
humouring him, and this section could have been written from Alleyn's
point of view just as the rest of the book is.
More seriously, this is the third of three books that has ended with
Alleyn reconstructing the crime, thus causing the murderer to give
him/herself away. That's getting rather samey.
All the characters are pretty thin, though the victim's daft sister
and her social-climbing pharmacist friend show some slight promise.
The actual motivation for the murder is a bit of a stretch. On the
other hand there are good comic touches, and the narrative manages to
maintain interest even in the middle section when things are plodding
along through repeated procedural details of just who was unobserved
at the crucial times.
An interesting historical note is that one of the characters espouses
eugenics, and this is treated with somewhat mixed feelings by Alleyn.
Most of the time I see such ideas in literature from the 1930s or
earlier, they're mentioned in a way that's at least broadly approving.
The book would be better with more characterisation and development of
motives, but it does still work on a technical level; Marsh isn't
impressing me with her writing, but these are early works and I like
to read series from the start.
Followed by Death in Ecstasy.
Comments on this post are now closed. If you have particular grounds for adding a late comment, comment on a more recent post quoting the URL of this one.