1968 classic English detective fiction; twenty-fifth of Marsh's novels
of Inspector Roderick Alleyn. Worn down by having to be too much in
public, Agatha Troy takes a river cruise in fen country. But nobody is
quite what they seem, and soon one of them will be dead.
There hasn't been much Troy in these books for a while, and
although even here she's shuffled off-stage at about the two-thirds
mark, this is her book in a way we haven't seen since Final Curtain.
Although there's a framing narrative in which Alleyn is lecturing on
the capture of a master criminal, Troy is the viewpoint character for
the first and more solid part of the book. Indeed, Alleyn's arrival
feels in some ways like an ending, particularly the way in which he
makes it clear that he knows who the villain is… though he doesn't
make an arrest immediately, and someone else dies before the book is
over.
In previous closed-environment mysteries by Marsh there have been
groups of fairly horrid people, most of whom turned out simply to be
naturally horrid rather than criminal. Here there's something at least
a bit wrong with most of the passengers, more than their surface
horridness, and while I thought it pretty obvious who would turn out
to be the master criminal the reasons for their all being here are
well-developed.
There are more of Marsh's winking hints, similar to what we got in
Dead Water:
"I got through to Superintendent Tillottson at Tollardwark. He gave
me details of his talks with my wife. One detail worried me a good
deal more than it did him."
Alleyn caught the inevitable glint of appreciation from the man in
the second row.
"Exactly," he said.
which are never explained, and this feels like cheating; similarly,
the repeated assertions by Alleyn that he knows the identity of the
villain, which in a conventional detective story would happen only
once and be a signal to the reader that turning the page would bring
the answer to the puzzle, feel out of place.
There's a black character, and Marsh jumps into 1960s race-relations
with both feet. Oh dear. She establishes that there's some difference
between types of racist, which I suppose is something.
The framing story is left dangling without any conclusion, which
rather robs it of any point, and there's never any explanation of jul
gur obql jnf zbirq… which (apart from providing atmosphere) is the
main thing about which the reader is invited to speculate.
The Troy bits are excellent, which for me makes up for shortcomings in
the detection. Followed by When in Rome.
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