1957 classic English detective fiction; nineteenth of Marsh's novels
of Inspector Roderick Alleyn. In the village of South Mardian, the
Dance of the Five Sons is still performed at midwinter; but this year
one of the dancers will be decapitated in truth as well as in jest. US
vt Death of a Fool.
This is a tricky book to review. On the one hand Marsh is
technically on solid form, with a seemingly impossible murder cleanly
resolved. But on the other she seems to have little patience with or
liking for her characters; most of them are varying degrees of horrid
and/or broken (including the village idiot for whom the "explanation"
is that he's a petit mal epileptic), and the Young Lovers are more
annoying than charming even to other characters.
"Darling, I'm terribly glad you said that."
"Are you? I'm so glad."
They gazed at each other with half smiles. Alleyn said: "To
interrupt for a moment your mutual rejoicing—" and they both jumped
slightly.
One that did work well for me was the German folklorist Mrs Bünz, who
intrudes herself into what's been quietly happening at the village for
centuries, with the aim of recording and publishing it all. I've met a
couple of German women with this kind of shameless inquisitiveness,
who will simply keep prying into what interests them in the face of
all social cues and even when explicitly told to go away (at which
point they look hurt, and carry on), and so I know this can be an
accurate rendering. And then there's the ex bomber pilot…
"I feel damn' sorry for him. As long as he was in uniform with his
ribbons up he was quite a person. That's how it was with those boys;
wasn't it? They lived high, wide and dangerous and they were
everybody's heroes. Then he was demobilized and came back here. You
know what county people are like: it takes a flying bomb to put a
dent in their class-consciousness, and then it's only temporary.
They began to say how ghastly the RAF slang was and to ask each
other if it didn't rock you a bit when you saw them out of uniform.
It's quite true that Simon bounded sky high and used an
incomprehensible and irritating jargon and that some of his
waistcoats were positively terrifying. All the same."
There's endless questioning about exactly where everyone was at each
moment of the dance, and it gets repetitive, because the challenge is
to spot the inconsistency in the accounts; but that's also pretty
tedious. The representation of dialect and accent gets quite heavy at
times. Alleyn often explains his theories to other people without the
reader being allowed to know what they are, which may be a necessary
part of the puzzle but feels like a cheat.
It didn't help that I spotted the murderer at the point of
introduction, and then only had to work out how it had been done. This
is of course a traditional mystery in which everyone benefits from the
death, so when Alleyn says
"I despise motive. [...] The case is lousy with motive.
Everybody's got a sort of motive. We can't ignore it, of course, but
it won't bring home the bacon, Brer Fox. Opportunity's the word, my
boy. Opportunity."
what also matters is personality: yes, X benefits, but is X the sort
of person who would plausibly kill in order to get that kind of
benefit?
As a technical murder mystery this is fine, but the characters are a
bit lacking, and I didn't enjoy this as much as I have most of Marsh.
Followed by Singing in the Shrouds.
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