Theatricals ahoy: Vintage Murder

Vintage Murder by Ngaio Marsh

published 1937

 

After looking at theatrical mysteries last week, and reading all the erudite comments, this book came back to my attention.

I read Vintage Murder 10 years ago but didn’t blog on it (though I have posted on almost all Ngaio Marsh's) and my notes say ‘rather a feeble one’. I have not significantly changed my mind, but have summoned up a few comments.

It deals with a group of travelling theatricals, come from London to New Zealand. Carolyn Dacres is the star actress, her husband and his business partner run the company, and there is the usual collection of young ingenues, old character players, and stagehands.

Inspector Roderick Alleyn, Marsh's regular sleuth, is travelling as a civilian on holiday and has fallen in with them – not connected to any crime – and the book opens with him sharing their private railway carriage on the way to their next performance, in Middleton, an imaginary NZ town. The usual tensions show themselves.

The next day, with the group now based in Middleton, there is an evening performance, to be followed by a special dinner on stage. The leading lady, Carolyn, is celebrating her birthday, and her husband has set up a surprise trick whereby a huge bottle of champagne will be lowered to the table from the flies. This goes wrong: the bottle falls on the head of one of the attendees. Is it just an accident or could it be….?  Guess.

So does this fit in with my previous list of  prop failures leading to death? Although the murder happens on stage, it is not part of a performance, though I suppose the jereboam could be considered to be a prop that plays its part in a dastardly plan…

Alleyn is welcomed by the local police (they’ve all read his book on methods of investigation) and now Marsh outdoes herself: there is 150 pages of people explaining where they were in minute detail, and whom they saw. It is stutifyingly dull. Alleyn is the only person still paying attention, and he identifies who must have done it. Even he has lost interest in motive by now. ‘Seems to point to something’ as a final explanation is a phrase that should have no place in a sensible crime book.  

My friend Brad Friedman, Ah Sweet Mystery blog, calls this fatal tendency in the author  ‘dragging the marshes’.

A small return on ploughing through it – some tiny points of interest.

1)  A group of travelling actors should be a great setting for a crime story, it’s quite hard to make it so dull. And the strange thing is that Marsh’s Colour Scheme, 1943, also has travelling actors in NZ, but is wildly entertaining and one of my all-time favourites of her books. Her much later book, False Scent, also has a grande dame actress celebrating a birthday - and I discussed in the post item number 2, Marsh's horror of age:

2)  With her usual dislike of old people, two of the actors are repeatedly referred to as old throughout the book, for no good reason. Old Susan, old Miss Max, old Miss Susan Max, old Brandon Vernon. (Susan Max is left over from an earlier Marsh theatrical book, Enter a Murderer)

3)  An unloved comic actor is referred to several times as a ‘footpath comedian’, with no indication as to what this means. I have been unable to track down the phrase.

4)  Very close to the end, Alleyn has a conversation with a stagedoorkeeper, Singleton, which is (finally) amusing – he keeps reminiscing about his years in the theatre in London, making wild and unlikely claims about his successes, praising the Swan of Stratford-on-Sea and claiming to have known Houdini and to have played Othello: he has to be constantly diverted from reminiscence to facts.  ‘What a fabulous bit of wreckage’ says Alleyn, and he is.

But honestly he is a small return for reading through this rather dull book.

The pictures come from a book about NZ drama of the era

https://archive.org/details/newzealanddrama10000thom

The show is a 1933 play called The Wind and the Rain, the first NZ play ever to be staged in the West End of London, and a huge success everywhere, worldwide. (though the book contains this line:  ‘the revival in 1981 left many wondering how it could originally have run for three years in London.’)