Black sheep and stage fright

I can never decide whether Ngaio Marsh’s Died in the Wool (1945) has one of the silliest or best detective fiction titles I have ever seen, and there are a lot of bad ones out there (ahem, Charlaine Harris). The story seems to be constructed around the pun; the dead body of a lady sheep farmer and member of parliament in New Zealand is found rather mashed up in…a pack of wool. It’s like calling a book Bloody Mary and having the main character be a woman called Mary who drowns in a vat of tomato juice clutching a stick of celery.

Nevertheless, once you get past the title, there’s a fair bit to enjoy in the book–as is only to be expected with one of the ladies of the Golden Age of detective fiction. Marsh’s go-to detective is Inspector Alleyn, an urbane, insightful, and less frenetic and more community-minded Lord Peter Wimsey, who actually belongs to the police force and has a steady job despite his sensitivity and appreciation for the arts. Alleyn is on a remote New Zealand farm during World War II to investigate rumours of espionage and Fifth Column activity; while there he gets involved in investigating the death of Flossie Rubrick (great name), a formidable and outspoken woman to whom many people are grateful, even indebted, and nobody likes. The cast of characters all have their own secrets, and the isolation and the descriptions of the New Zealand scenery and atmosphere give this novel a slightly more refined and individual air than the typical country-house mystery. There’s a bit of a love story, a bit of humour, and some good old-fashioned detectoring.

Final Curtain seems somehow a less egregious pun, but it’s still not a great title. It is, of course, set amid a theatrical family, whose patriarch Sir Henry Ancred is a famous actor in the English theatre, darling, and has a private stage in his country mansion. The family are pretty much at loggerheads, especially after Sir Henry brings home a younger lady to upset his children and potentially their chance of inheriting. Into this family drama steps Agatha Troy–who happens to be engaged to Inspector Alleyn–who she hasn’t seen for a long time. I haven’t read any of the earlier ones in Marsh’s Alleyn sequence, so I’ve missed the setup of their courtship and marriage (and I think it would be best, perhaps, to begin reading Marsh from the beginning–you get what’s going on in terms of the mystery of the week in each individual book, but some of the human interest factor is lost without the backstory, I think; it’s not like the Poirot stories which pretty much stand alone as he doesn’t form many attachments). Agatha is a portrait painter hired to paint Sir Ancred for his 70th birthday, but the celebration doesn’t quite go as planned. The theatrical milieu tends to work well in detective fiction because of the performative aspects of both crime and detection–disguises, lies, masks, hiding true characters and motivations, playing the role of hero and villain, and it serves well enough here. Again, there is some romance and humour.

Overall, while I enjoyed these books, I found them a bit complicated to follow–they lack Sayers’s depth and Christie’s deceptive simplicity. These two were the first two in an omnibus volume of three, and I never got around to reading the third. I am inclined to check out the earlier volumes, though.