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A review by qalminator
A Man Lay Dead by Ngaio Marsh
3.0
Not as good as early Agatha Christie, but enjoyable enough if you're in the mood for a murder mystery.
The biggest oddity is the attempts to write accents phonetically, with varying degrees of success. The inherent problem with this is that your audience may or may not share your accent and pronunciation of such words, so it may be more confusing than anything else. Case in point: "presoom". Presumably this is to indicate that it's an "ooh" sound rather than the more British "yoo", but it made me wonder about the 's' as well. If we're going phonetic, the regular pronunciation that I know would replace the 's' with a 'z'. Is lack of replacement to indicate that it's pronounced the usual way, or that the speaker actually pronounces it as a 'sss' sound? I have no idea.
The biggest oddity is the attempts to write accents phonetically, with varying degrees of success. The inherent problem with this is that your audience may or may not share your accent and pronunciation of such words, so it may be more confusing than anything else. Case in point: "presoom". Presumably this is to indicate that it's an "ooh" sound rather than the more British "yoo", but it made me wonder about the 's' as well. If we're going phonetic, the regular pronunciation that I know would replace the 's' with a 'z'. Is lack of replacement to indicate that it's pronounced the usual way, or that the speaker actually pronounces it as a 'sss' sound? I have no idea.