Comfort Reading

Excellent tale, well crafted, with a children’s story book feel to some of the dialogue, though none the worse for it. Well defined characters, and a nicely paced plot made it a great listen. The narrator did a great job too. I’ll be looking for more!

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Typical yarn

Nevertheless still enjoyable. Didn't see the outcome.
This is an easy to listen to tale, which is good for destressing.

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cracking who dunnit

great story. rattles along at a cracking pace. very hood narration. was easy to follow all the different characters. very enjoyable

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Simply sublime.

Beautifully constructed and written, as always, by one of the very best of the Queens of crime fiction. Marsh's novels, while of their time and dating marginally less favourably in respect of their social mores than Christie and Allingham, are indisputably brilliant in their authorship. Alleyn is a superb creation, as is Fox, both of whom bring every single novel to vivid and thrilling life.

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Well read good detective story

The story was well read. A lovely story from the age of the best detective novels.

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Phillip Franks makes an excellent Alleyn

I spent the first few chapters wondering if I'd read this story sometime in the past, I am sure I have, still it was thoroughly enjoyable to listen to again, and Phillip Franks talented reading only added to the enjoyment.

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a more sympathetic narrator

I loved reading the Ngaio Marsh Alleyn novels when I was a teenager in the 1980s, but I have hitherto found the narrators for the unabridged recordings unsympathetic. So I was pleased to discover this recording with Philip Franks who can read Golden Age crime novels without sounding contemptuous Galloped though it in a day. The earlier novels are more dated but a good narrator can overcome that with a good performance.

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An elegant medical murder

Beautifully plotted, filled with interesting characters and topics of the day in the mid ‘30ies like anarchists, bolsheviks, and eugenics.
Wonderfully performed.

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His life in their hands...

The Home Secretary, Sir Derek O’Callaghan, is in the middle of steering an important bill through Parliament to counter the threat from anarchists and Bolshevists. So although he is suffering from intermittent abdominal pains, he is ignoring them until he has more time to deal with personal issues. And the personal issues are piling up! As well as his health and threats against his life from those Bolshies, his doctor, Sir John Phillips, is furious at the way he has treated a nurse who works in Sir John’s clinic, having seduced and then dumped her. It’s probable his wife won’t be too happy if she learns about that little episode either! His sister, meantime, thinks that all his woes and ills can be cured by one of the many patent medicines she acquires from her pharmacist friend. It all comes to a crisis when Sir Derek collapses while giving a speech in the House of Commons. He is rushed to Sir John’s clinic where he is diagnosed with peritonitis requiring immediate surgery. Hmm… surgery carried out by the doctor who’s furious at him, the nurse he seduced, an anaesthetist who previously accidentally killed a patient, and another nurse who is a Bolshevist in her spare time. So when he subsequently dies, it’s not altogether surprising that suspicions of murder arise! Enter Chief Detective-Inspector Roderick Alleyn of the Yard…

It’s a long time since I last read a Ngaio Marsh, but I was very fond of her books back in the day, and happily this was a pleasant revisit. It’s a nice mix of whodunit and howdunit, and the investigation is mostly carried out through a series of interviews Alleyn has with the various suspects. It soon transpires that Sir Derek had been poisoned with hyoscine, a drug that had been used as part of his preparation for surgery. So suspicion naturally falls on Sir John, since he gave the hyoscine injection. But Alleyn quickly realises that many other people had the opportunity to give him another injection or perhaps to have given him the drug in another form. So it all comes down to motive and method – who wanted him dead (lots of people!) and who could have given him the drug, and how.

The one thing that makes me not wholeheartedly love Marsh as much as I do, for example, Christie, is the snobbishness in the books – a fault she of course shares with many of the Golden Age writers. Alleyn is one of these aristocratic policeman (did they ever exist in real life, I wonder?) and his sidekick, Inspector Fox, is a “common man”. Alleyn is very fond of Fox but is horribly patronising towards him, as is Marsh herself. When thinking about it, I wonder if part of the reason that Christie has remained so popular is that Poirot’s sidekick is a man of the same or even higher class than Poirot himself, so that while Poirot may mock his intelligence from time to time there’s no feeling of snobbery. Alleyn’s Fox, Sayers’ portrayal of Wimsey’s sidekick, Bunter, and Allingham’s Lugg, sidekick for Campion, all make the books feel much more dated than Christie and in a way of which modern audiences are less tolerant, I feel. Although I do often wonder what contemporary working class readers, who surely made up the bulk of the readership for all these authors, made of their mockery of the working classes. We were more deferential, for sure, back then, but even so. Anyway, I digress.

Alleyn also has another occasional sidekick in the person of a young journalist, Nigel Bathgate, and he and his fiancée, Angela, appear in this one. Alleyn sends them off to infiltrate an anarchist meeting, and has fun with the portrayal of these bogeymen of the era, complete with stock bearded Russian Bolshevist. Nigel and Angela are Bright Young Things, and provide some levity which lightens the tone. Alleyn himself is quite a cheerful detective, who enjoys his job and has a keen sense of justice. So while the books aren’t quite cosy, nor are they dark and grim.

The eventual solution veers over the credibility line but the general tone of the book means this doesn’t matter as much as it would in a darker style of novel. I was rather proud of the fact that I spotted one or two clues, but I was still surprised when all was revealed.

I listened to the audiobook narrated by Philip Franks, and he did a very good job, getting into the spirit of the more caricatured characters (the Bolshevists, for instance) while making both Alleyn and Fox likeable, as they are on the page.

Overall, an enjoyable reunion with some old friends, and I’m looking forward to revisiting some of the other books. This is an early one, and I may try a late one next, to see if the snobbery gets toned down as time passes.

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Golden Age story, well read

An excellent example of the Golden Age detective story, effectively read by an equally excellent actor

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