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A review by book_concierge
Enter a Murderer by Ngaio Marsh
2.0
Chief Detective-Inspector Roderick Alleyn accepts his journalist friend’s, Nigel Bathgate, invitation for a night of theatre to see a hit mystery play. But the actors and audience are all surprised when the play’s villain is shot not with blanks but with a live cartridge which someone has slipped into the prop gun. Alleyn has, of course, witnessed the event, and he’s immediately on hand to begin the investigation and ensure no one leaves the theater without being questioned, but there are no easy answers. The fact that the deceased was a nasty piece of work, involved in blackmail and drugs, and that he was one of two men who both professed to love the same woman just further complicates the scenario. It seems that everyone from the sleepy doorman to the theater owner/producer is a suspect.
Marsh is one of the queens of mystery writing, alongside Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers. She crafts a complicated story with many plot twists and red herrings to keep the reader interested and engaged. There is little descriptive prose; most of the action is done in the form of dialogue. So it’s really what the characters say or don’t say, and by inference how they behave, that form the important “clues.”
I found it hard to get into this particular mystery. I didn’t really care about any of the characters, including Inspector Alleyn and Nigel Bathgate. I think my problem was the heavy use of dialogue. Normally I would like this kind of writing; perhaps I just wasn’t in the right frame of mind. In any case, my reaction was decidedly “blah.”
Marsh is one of the queens of mystery writing, alongside Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers. She crafts a complicated story with many plot twists and red herrings to keep the reader interested and engaged. There is little descriptive prose; most of the action is done in the form of dialogue. So it’s really what the characters say or don’t say, and by inference how they behave, that form the important “clues.”
I found it hard to get into this particular mystery. I didn’t really care about any of the characters, including Inspector Alleyn and Nigel Bathgate. I think my problem was the heavy use of dialogue. Normally I would like this kind of writing; perhaps I just wasn’t in the right frame of mind. In any case, my reaction was decidedly “blah.”