This is my third Ngaio Marsh of the year, after Colour Scheme (the twelfth in the Roderick Alleyn series) and Vintage Murder (the fifth).

This one, published in 1938, is the sixth in the series, so I'm finally reading them in chronological order. And it opens in Suva, Fiji, with Alleyn on the way back from New Zealand, where he'd come off holiday to work on the Vintage Murder case.


Which is a good excuse for pictures from Suva, Fiji, 2005...

This is the first Marsh novel that I've read (as opposed to listened to), and it's the first that has not been set in New Zealand.

And I actually read it in German. Which is where the above title comes from (in German it's Mord im Atelier). It's actually not such a cleverly ambiguous title as the English original, which is Artists in Crime. There was indeed one "murder in the studio", but there were lots of artists, and among them all, a fair number of sharp practices, which they definitely have off to a fine art.

Anyway, the German version, translated by Hilda Maria Martens, appeared in 1984, and was part of the Rote Krimi series. I read it courtesy of the Internet Archive.

It opens very memorably: "Detective Inspector Alleyn leaned over the ship's railing and looked out over the rain-soaked, brown dock of Suva and into the faces of the people standing there looking up at the deck. Another minute or two -- and the ship would slide out. Everything would become unimportant -- just a faint memory. Alleyn tried to memorize the scene -- at first in jest, but then with almost exaggerated precision."

I've done this. Not actually in Suva, but plenty of times elsewhere. It rings true.

It's in this book that Alleyn acquires his love interest, a talented artist named Agatha Troy. She's also travelling on the ship from Suva, and he inadvertently disturbs her as she is painting the departure scene. She has rendered in her painting everything he has tried to remember... Which, of course, piques his interest.

(Incidentally, I learn from various reviews that the artist is referred to throughout as just "Troy" in the English version, which presumably lends a business-like and unsentimental feel to the narrative. This trick is not replicated in the German, where she is always Miss Troy or Agatha Troy. In general, judging by reviews with English quotations, I think I might have missed out on Marsh's "clear, subtle, ironic, unsentimental, but always elegant and frequently witty" prose, and read a text that concentrates more on the story than the style.)

Alleyn and Troy have a bit of a spiky initial exchange, then, but things become amicable enough for her to paint his portrait (which he later presents to his 65-year-old mother, a feisty kind of woman, who -- we're told -- reads D.H. Lawrence in the early hours of the morning, seated in her little boudoir in front of a big fire...)

The artist and the policeman are thrown back together when a murder is committed at the little art retreat that Troy is running at her home (which happens to be close to Alleyn's mother's). Of course, it's never good when someone you've taken a bit of a fancy to on the passage home shows up next as a possible murder suspect. And I did wonder whether he should have recused himself... Anyway, it's probably not much of a spoiler to say she wasn't the malefactor...

And the evolving relationship -- featuring people who are prickly, shy, and self-protective, doing a one-step-forward-one-step-back dance -- is definitely one of the book's strong points, I think.

According to Neil Nyren of Crime Reads, there's "more than a little bit of autobiography in the strong-minded Troy, who shared many of Marsh’s own views about art and society" (Marsh, of course, was personally familiar with the milieu of painters, just as she had an intimate understanding of the world of the theatre). He quotes Marsh as remarking: "I like Troy. When I am writing about her, I can see her with her shortish dark hair, thin face and hands. She’s absent-minded, shy and funny, and she can paint like nobody’s business."



But all this is a sideshow. The actual plot revolves around two murders. Marsh seems to specialize in bizarre forms of death... Up to now in the Alleyn series, we've had death by boiling mud pool, and death by plummeting jereboam of champagne. The cause of the death in the studio is also far from run-of-the-mill, as I will explain.

Cedric Malmsley, one of the artists in Troy's class, is illustrating a romantic medieval tale. Let's imagine A is the man, B his wife, and C his lover. According to the story, C is killed by means of a dagger that has been stuck blade upwards (by B) in the bench on which C is about to lie (with A).

Agatha has the model pose as C in this scenario, making it a kind of technical exercise for her charges to paint. The artists then start to argue about whether it would really be possible to murder someone like this, and they set up a trial run with a knife belonging to their mentor. They come to the conclusion such a plot could work, withdraw the knife, and carry on.

A couple of days later, the model (a difficult woman whom no-one likes) dies before the students' very eyes, impaled on a knife that has reappeared in the cloth-shrouded bench where she normally reclines...

There is a second murder, involving a fairly nasty poison, but that's a less ground-breaking modus operandi.



There's less atmosphere in this story than there was in the two New Zealand-based ones I read previously. (But, for me, the corollary of this different setting is that there's less angsting about the way New Zealand is portrayed...)

There's Marsh's usual string of characters, in this case all fairly unlikeable. I usually find myself listing them all somewhere near the beginning of the read... But at least an expanded cast means we have plenty of motives to juggle with.

And we start off fairly slowly, with a group interview by Alleyn (surely unorthodox?) and then lots of individual interviews.

But the pace quickens, and it all becomes quite gripping. I didn't suspect the person everyone suspected, but I also didn't pick the person who really did it. And when all comes to light, it's quite a chilling scenario.

Next: Death in a White Tie...