A Man Lay Dead
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A Man Lay Dead
Narrated by:
Philip Franks
Buy Now for £14.35
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Narrated by:
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Philip Franks
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By:
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Ngaio Marsh
Summary
Wealthy Sir Hubert Handesley's original and lively weekend house parties are deservedly famous. To amuse his guests, he has devised a new form of the fashionable Murder Game, in which a guest is secretly selected to commit a 'murder' in the dark, and everyone assembles to solve the crime. But when the lights go up this time, there is a real corpse....
©1934 Ngaio Marsh (P)2015 Hachette Audio
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Enjoyable light listening
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A classic!
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Philips Franks is one of the few truly brilliant narrators. Wonderful at all the voices and accents, and he is able to make the female characters sound female and not like a man being camp.. I wish he'd narrated more of the early Marsh's.
A truly brilliant narration by Philip Franks
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This is an entertaining romp that doesn’t take itself too seriously, and nor must the reader! It’s always interesting to get a glimpse of how a long-running detective series starts out. Sometimes the detective springs fully formed onto the stage. Sometimes it takes a book or three for the author to settle into a style. This is one of the latter. While Alleyn is fundamentally the same man as in the later books, here he’s relentlessly light-hearted, always with a smart quip even when it seems entirely inappropriate, and horribly smug about his own superior mental prowess – not in an endearing-Poirot way, more in an I-want-to-punch-him way.
Inspector Fox, Alleyn’s right-hand man in most of the series, hasn’t yet been created, and Nigel Bathgate is given the role of sidekick instead. Nigel is a very young journalist whom Alleyn doesn’t know prior to this case, so it’s extremely odd that Alleyn takes him into his confidence when he has an entire police force of subordinates available to him, but never mind! Nigel is quite fun and promptly falls in love with fellow guest, Angela North, who is a modern young woman in the style of Tuppence Beresford. Nigel himself is not entirely unlike Tommy Beresford, and his role vis-a-vis Alleyn is reminiscent of the role a certain Captain Hastings plays elsewhere. I think it’s reasonably easy to see where Marsh’s early influences came from! In reality, Nigel’s role is to allow Alleyn to explain his thought processes for the sake of the reader, and it works despite the unlikeliness of it. The books do feel more realistic later in the series, however, once this sidekick role is handed over to Fox, a fellow police officer, although Bathgate continues to pop up quite often throughout the series if I remember rightly.
The plot! Hmm, well, let’s be kind and call it fun. The victim (whom I won’t name since it takes a while before the murder happens and we don’t know who will die) turns out not to have been a very nice person, so lots of people have motives, be it ill-treated lovers or jealous spouses of said lovers, or people who hope to inherit either money or some of the precious objects in the victim’s collection of rarities. And does the presence of not just one sinister Russian, but two, portend some kind of secret society with strange reasons for grudges? Of course it does! But is their grudge against the victim or are they up to something equally nefarious but coincidental? It always makes me laugh how often sinister Russians appear in Golden Age mysteries – they are responsible for a lot of the more preposterous plots of the time. I fear in this one the whole Russian strand was more like a comedy sketch than an actual plot, and became a little wearing in the number of clichés packed into it. Talking of preposterous brings me to the murder method. I wouldn’t say it’s the most unlikely way to kill someone I’ve ever read – the Golden Agers were inventive, after all – but it’s high up the list.
I always feel a lot of leeway has to be given to the first in a series, especially when it’s also the author’s first novel. If it persuades a reader to come back for the second book, it has basically done its job, and happily the entertainment level in this one is high enough to make the reader willing to overlook some of the less polished aspects and leave her wanting more. And we’re in the happy position of knowing that Alleyn and Marsh went on to have a successful and highly regarded partnership. I’m enjoying revisiting this old favourite series and look forward to seeing Marsh’s style develop over the next few books. 3½ stars for me, so rounded up.
I listened to the audiobook narrated by Philip Franks, who does a fine job for the most part, although his Angela sounded a little too much like Lady Bracknell or Aunt Dahlia for my taste. But he did the comedy Russians well!
Murder with added Russians…
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Quite enjoyable, not my cup of tea though
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