1962 classic English detective fiction; twenty-second of Marsh's novels
of Inspector Roderick Alleyn. Friction in a pair of country houses is
the precursor to murder, but everything's tangled in the extreme.
This is the kind of murder in which everyone has a motive, and
the victim doesn't seem to be of any great loss to anybody.
Alleyn was visited by the fleeting wish that he could run into
somebody who at least pretended to have liked Mr. Cartell.
If one ignores the Young Lovers and the Most Obvious Suspect, there
aren't very many potential murderers left.
But it's the setting and the people who are more interesting here. The
elderly bachelor obsessed with class because he knows he's not quite
the thing himself; the victim's unmarried sister, and particularly the
horrible people she's taken up (her "adopted niece" and the latter's
boyfriend). In fact it's that Mr Leiss who gets most of the colour in
the book.
Young Mr. Leiss stared damply at Nicola and then shook hands--also
damply. He was pallid and had large eyes, a full mouth and small
chin. The sleeves of his violently checked jacket displayed an
exotic amount of shirt-cuff and link. He smelt very strongly of hair
oil. Apart from these features it would have been hard to say why he
seemed untrustworthy.
It's a fairly timeless story, in large part because it feels as if it
had been written for Marsh's favourite 1930s, and then wrenched down
the decades with a scatter of mentions of "an association with a
flick-knife gang" and television.
"Think they own the place, those chaps," the driver rejoined.
"Putting the sewer up the side lane by Mr. Period's house, and what
for? Nobody wants it."
Marsh is by this point in her career a master of structure, and
carefully sets things up to elide the time between the discovery of
the body (at the end of chapter 3) and Alleyn's having been summoned
and brought up to date by the local man at the start of chapter 4.
There's even time for a little bit of Troy.
Va gur raq V sbhaq fbzr bs gur fnzr frafr gung V trg sebz Qba
Tvbinaav: gung gur byqre trarengvba ng yrnfg unir gur thzcgvba gb
pbzzvg zheqre, juvyr gur lbhatre pna'g znantr fb pbapregrq na npgvba
ohg vafgrnq zrff nebhaq jvgu fyrnml naq crggl pevzvanyvgl.
"Your ideas about what would be nice vary between a watertight
capital charge and cold lamb with cucumber relish."
At this point I'm reading Marsh for the people more than the puzzles,
and on that basis the book satisfies. Followed by Dead Water.
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