This is another detective story by Ngaio Marsh (1895-1982). It was published in 1938, and is the seventh in the Roderick Alleyn series.

It's my fourth. I started well out of order with Colour Scheme (No. 12), and then jumped back to Vintage Murder (No. 5), but I've since been following chronologically, with Murder in the Studio (No. 6, published as Artists in Crime), and now this one. My audio-version was brilliantly narrated by James Saxon.



The milieu is the upper echelons of British society at a time when young women went through the "coming out" ritual that marked them as adult and marriageable. Marsh conveys the atmosphere of the whole business very well: It's exciting for the young participants, but uncomfortable for the introverts among them, exhausting and stressful for the hostesses whose reputations will be made or marred by the success (or otherwise) of a party, and definitely open to the cyncicism of those decrying this blatant marriage market.

Saxon is quite masterful in presenting the various degrees of plumminess larding the characters' voices. I hate and despise the British class system, but this is an undeniably funny portrayal, and Marsh's narrative and Saxon's performance tread a very clever line between representation and satire. Marsh, as a New Zealander, is generally regarded as well placed to observe the way social class plays out in the lives of the English of her day.

Running along in the background of this social collage is a rather nasty blackmail business, which has already caused a lot of suffering, but gets really out of hand when a murder is committed.


Ngaio Marsh


March 1992. She was born in Christchurch, which is backed by mountains like these

It's actually my favourite Marsh so far. The mode of death is not quite so outlandish, and the cast of characters is much more manageable, enabling the reader to advance more informed guesses about the explanation. I partly got it right. I had definitely developed suspicions about the mastermind of the blackmail plot, and I was very happy that the unfortunate (and often maligned) foreign side-kick, while guilty of blackmail, turned out to have been acting under duress, and was not responsible for the murder.

When the reader is really sad to hear the identity of a murder victim, it's a reliable sign that the author is doing a good job. I don't think it's much of a spoiler to say that the one to meet an untimely end is Lord Robert Gospell (nicknamed Bunchy, for reasons we're never told). He'd been introduced at length in the previous few chapters as an odd little man, but a really kind-hearted one. Bunchy is whip-smart under his urbane, gossipy exterior; he has a distinguished Foreign Office career behind him; and Inspector Alleyn has entrusted him with some informal investigations into the blackmail scenario. But we also see him talking to shy debutantes, and unobtrusively drawing them into a wider circle; or dancing with the unimportant people who don't attract other partners; or reassuring the harried society ladies who are run ragged by their entertainment duties. When Bunchy leaves that party, I thought: Oh no, surely she can't kill him off; that would be SUCH a shame...

This is also the book that moves Alleyn's romance with "Troy" a bit further along. She's actually Agatha Troy, but she's universally known as Troy (another bit of nomenclature that's not explained); and she's an artist.


Ngaio Marsh Painting, 1930s, by Olivia Spencer Bower. Marsh initially pursued a career as an artist, and although she subsequently turned to acting and writing, she continued to paint throughout her life, which must have lent depth to her depiction of Troy's artistic powers of observation

Alleyn and Troy met in the previous novel, but in the inauspicious circumstances of a murder case. She's a spiky kind of character, not one to be bowled over by some stray inspector, even a tall, aristocratic, and cultured one. But in this novel, we definitely move forward, and she admits that -- almost despite herself -- she regards Alleyn's continued pursuit with a kindly eye. We can definitely see a wedding on the horizon.

According to Neil Nyren, Marsh's London agent was very dubious about the plan to marry Alleyn off: "But there was more than a little bit of autobiography in the strong-minded Troy, who shared many of Marsh’s own views about art and society (her repugnance for capital punishment, for instance), and whom she deemed a good match for Alleyn."

A contemporary reviewer in the Times Literary Supplement, quoted here, certainly took a dim view: "It would be a pity if the example set by Miss Sayers with Lord Peter Wimsey of entangling her detective of seemingly settled and delightful bachelor habits in a serious-minded love affair were to be regularly followed by all writers of detective stories. We leave Chief Inspector Alleyn suitably affianced at the end of this story... It is to be hoped, with all due respect to Miss Sayers, that when Alleyn is next confronted with a corpse it will not be in the course of his honeymoon."

That site, by the way, also quotes the opinion of Dashiell Hammett: "Ngaio Marsh’s Death in a White Tie is the best detective story I have read this year." Well, if it's good enough for Dashiell...


Portrait of Marsh, 1983, by Vy Elsom