UNCOMMON MYSTERIES: Ngaio Marsh, A Man Lay Dead (1934) and Surfeit of Lampreys (1941)

            Ngaio Marsh invented her gentleman detective, police inspector Roderick Alleyn, in 1934 with A Man Lay Dead. Alleyn is in the tradition of detectives of gentle—sometimes even noble—birth, but he is not nearly as obnoxiously flippant and foppish as Dorothy Sayers’s Lord Peter Wimsey or the American Philo Vance.

            This first Alleyn book is not as good as later ones, supposedly causing Marsh to cringe at its thin plot and amateurish devices: for example an unnecessary re-creation of the crime with everyone assembled at the end, and a murderer who slides down the country house’s bannister in order to commit the crime. The Alleyn series eventually included thirty-two books, and the one critics seem to like best is the tenth, published in 1941 and titled Surfeit of Lampreys.

            From the point of view of Roberta Grey, a New Zealander who first meets the Lampreys in New Zealand when she is fourteen, we are introduced to Lord Charles Lamprey, younger brother of the childless Marquis of Wutherwood and Rune, Charles’s wife Charlotte or Imogen, and their six children, Henry, the oldest, who eventually becomes a romantic interest for Roberta (whom the Lampreys call Robin), Frid or Elfrida the aspiring actress, the identical twins Colin and Stephen, Patricia, called Patch, and the youngest, Michael, who is eleven when Roberta, now twenty, comes to England after the death of her parents to find a job. The Lampreys have moved back to England with the failure of the scheme to live in New Zealand because it was supposedly cheaper. Roberta is in love with the feckless Lampreys, their nonchalance in the face of debt or murder, and their charming irresponsibility.

 The day after Roberta arrives, Charles and his brother the Marquis quarrel when Charles asks for money. The Marquis leaves and is murdered in the lift on his way down, or while the lift is still on the Lampreys’ floor. Chief Inspector Roderick Alleyn investigates with his assistant Fox, whom Alleyn often calls Br’er Fox or Foxikins. Because the culprit is most likely someone in the Lamprey household, and Charles is the Marquis’s heir, the family closes ranks in their interviews with Alleyn, lying when they think it necessary to protect any one of them. Aside from Charles, another suspect is the Marquis’s wife Lady Violet, who is nutty and has recently taken up the black arts. There are also a couple of servants in the household as well as the chauffeur and lady’s maid who have come with the Marquis and his wife.

Marsh was a painter, an actor, and a theatre director, and her plots tend to bring in these worlds in charades (such as that involving the murder weapon in Surfeit of Lampreys), amateur plays (such as the murder game at the country house in A Man Lay Dead that turns into real murder) and pantomimes, actual theatre productions, art and artists such as Agatha Troy, who is Alleyn’s wife, and numerous quotations, especially from Macbeth, or, as theatre people like to say because of the play’s notorious reputation for bringing bad luck, The Scottish Play.