Death at the Bar by Ngaio Marsh (1940)

 

A dart's night at the Plume of Feathers, an old-fashioned pub at a small village in Devonshire, turns into a crime scene. Lawyer Luke Watchman, his cousin, Sebastian Parish who is a handsome and celebrated actor, and their friend, Norman Cubitt, a distinguished artist, are visiting the village after a year’s absence and are staying at the pub. Since their last visit some of the locals have formed the 'Coombe Left Movement' and think that the class problem and other ills could be solved by a Revolution.
The Secretary and Treasurer of the Movement is a man called Robert Legge. On the night of the dart game a man is murdered by poison and an inquest is held into the death. Cyanide was found on one of the darts and when Legge had thrown it, it had hit a man’s hand and he had died afterwards.
An inquest was held but no one was charged.

The coroner was Mr. Mordant, a sixty-seven-year old who suffered from dyspepsia:

He seemed to regard his fellow men with brooding suspicion, he sighed a great deal, and had a trick of staring despondently at the merest acquaintances. He at one time specialised in bacteriology and it was said of him that he saw human beings as mere playgrounds for brawling micrococci. It was also said that when Mr Mordant presided over an inquest, the absence in court of the corpse was not felt.

One man not happy with the lack of a conviction, presents himself to Scotland Yard and states his opinion on the case. The Yard decides to help with the investigation but the detectives have a chilly reception when they arrive at the Plume of Feathers. The police are part of the established order which the Coombe Left Movement considers to be corrupt to the core. The anti-authoritarian attitudes and hostility among the locals involved in the group hampers the investigation.

As this book was published in 1940, I thought that there would be references to the war but apart from a couple of passing comments about a soldier or two waiting to be called up, that was about as far as it went. This little village seemed completely isolated from the wider world. However, according to my copy of the book, it seems that Marsh finished writing it on May 3rd, 1939, and she was in New Zealand, so that may account for that.

On September 3, 1939 Britain declared war. The British Communist Party at first supported the war, but within a few weeks its line changed. On October 7, a manifesto was issued which referred to an ‘imperialist war’ and called for a government which would begin peace negotiations. Thereafter, the party’s official line remained essentially the same until June 1941, when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, whereupon the Party entered into support for the war.

Ngaio Marsh (1895-1982) had a wonderful sense of humour that trickles into conversations and comes out in her characters. She captures all the little idiosyncrasies of character found in people who live at close quarters and who hold opposing views.
In one conversation, Mr. Nark, a prosperous farmer, was denouncing capitalism and its lack of a scientific outlook to Mr Oates, the village constable who was hoping to rise in his profession.

‘Do you know, Dick Oates,’ continued Mr. Nark, ‘that you’ve got a rudimentary tail?’

‘And if I have, which I don’t admit – ‘

‘Ask Mr Cubitt, then. He’s an artist and no doubt has studied the skeleton of man in its present stage of evolution. The name escapes me for the moment, but we’ve all got it. Isn’t that correct, sir?’

‘Yes, yes,’ said Mr Cubitt hurriedly. ‘Quite right Mr Nark.’

‘There you are,’ said Mr Nark. ‘Apes, every manjack of us, and our arms have only grown shorter through us knocking off the habit of hanging from trees.’

‘What about our tongues?’ asked Mr Oates.

‘Never mind about them,’ answered Mr Nark warmly, ‘do you know that an unborn child’s got gills like a fish?’

‘That doesn’t make a monkey out of it, however.’

‘It goes to show, though.’

‘What’?’

‘You want to educate yourself. In a proper government the State ‘ud educate the police so’s they’d understand these deep matters for themselves. They know all about that in Russia. Scientific necessity that’s what it is.’

‘I don’t see how knowing I’ve got a bit of a tail and once had a pair of gills is going to get me any nearer to a sergeant’s stripe,’ reasoned Mr. Oates. ‘What I’d like is a case.’

Mr Oates gets his wish.

Roderick Alleyn, at 43 years of age, the youngest chief-inspector at New Scotland Yard and his sidekick, Mr. Fox, a big, burly fellow of about fifty (affectionately called Br’er Fox by Alleyn) have a good working relationship and an obvious liking for each other.
The case is convoluted and just when you think the murderer has been identified, a piece of evidence throws suspicion on someone else. I thought a couple of people could have done the deed and was surprised by the outcome. It was a person I’d suspected at first and then changed my mind.

Ngaio Marsh was a New Zealander and spent most of her life in Christchurch in the South Island, so I was impressed that she could describe the English countryside as well as if she had lived there all her life.
Marsh originally studied art and toured New Zealand with a Shakespearean company. She was credited for single-handedly reviving Shakespeare in New Zealand and encouraging young performers. Considered a ‘Crime Queen’ alongside Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers and Margery Allingham, she wrote thirty-two novels featuring her detective, Roderick Alleyn. The theatre and painting feature in her stories and Alleyn is married to an artist. This background in the arts is unique to her work and adds richness to her novels.

Suspicions, Bacon remarked, that are artificially nourished by the tales and whisperings of others, have stings.

Colour Scheme by Ngaio Marsh (1943)

Colour Scheme by Ngaio Marsh (1895-1982) is a WWII crime mystery set in a fictional spot on the North Island of New Zealand similar to the geothermal area of Rotorua with its distinctive sulphurous odour.
Colonel Edward Claire, his wife, and their two adult children, are incompetently running the mud bath resort. Mrs Claire’s brother, James Ackrington, a crusty and disagreeable physician, joins them upon his retirement. Suspicious about the behaviour of one of the resort’s residents in relation to the torpedoing of the S.S Hippolyte off the New Zealand coast, Ackrington writes to Chief Inspector Roderick Allen who had been sent to NZ to investigate the incident.

Into this situation comes Mr Gaunt, a celebrated Shakespearian actor looking for some relief from his bodily ills, accompanied by his secretary, Dikon Bell and Cockney servant, Alfred Colly.
However, everyone comes under suspicion when a man who is making himself unpleasant generally goes missing.
Did he fall accidentally into the geothermal mud pool? Was he an enemy spy? Who would want to kill him?

‘“This War is changing the values of my generation. There are all sorts of things that we have thought funny that we shall never think funny again.” For perhaps the first time he contemplated coldly and deliberately a possible invasion of New Zealand.’

The backdrop of the lush Northland vegetation and the bubbling thermal pools is an unusual setting especially for a book set during WWII. The interaction between the various characters and the local Maoris, their beliefs and veneration of certain artefacts, is what you’d expect it to be considering the time period.




'The Maori people are a kindly and easy-going race. In temperament they are so vivid a mixture of Scottish Highlander and Irishman that to many observers the resemblance seems more than fortuitous.'

Dr Ackrington's opinion:

'The natives of this country have been ruined by their own inertia and the criminal imbecility of the white population. We sent missionaries to stop them eating each other and bribed them with bad whisky to give us their land. We cured them of their own perfectly good communistic system, and taught them how to loaf on government support. We took away their chiefs and gave them trade-union secretaries. And for mating customs that agreed very well with them, we substituted, wth a sanctimonious grimace, disease and holy matrimony."'

This was a light read with quite a bit of family altercations, banter and humour scattered around. I thought Ngaio Marsh had a clever resolution of the mystery. I certainly didn’t expect it!
There was also a nicely handled romance between Dikon Bell and Barbara, Colonel Claire’s daughter.

'Unable to compete with the few neighbouring families whom her parents considered “suitable,” and prevented by a hundred reservations and prejudices from forming friendships with the “unsuitable,” (Barbara) had ended by forming no friendships at all. Occasionally she would be asked to some local festivity, but her clothes were all wrong, her face unpainted, and her manner nervous and uneven. She alarmed the young men with her gusts of frightened laughter and her too eager attentiveness. If her shyness had taken any other form she might have found someone to befriend her, but as it was she hovered on the outside of every group, making her hostess uneasy or irritable, refusing to recognize the rising misery of her own loneliness. She was happier when she was no longer invited and settled down to her course of emotional starvation...'

Something I learned from this book...habeas corpus is Latin for ‘you must have the body.’
I thought this meant the victim’s body but it refers to the body of the accused: 'a writ requiring a person under arrest to be brought before a judge or into court, especially to secure the person's release unless lawful grounds are shown for their detention.'

'Police investigation...is not a matter of equally balanced motives, tortuous elaborations, and a final revelation in the course of which the investigator’s threat hangs like an ignis fatuous over first one and then another of the artificially assembled suspects. It is rather the slow amassment of facts sufficient to justify the arrest of someone who has been more or less suspect from the moment the crime was discovered.'





Ngaio Marsh was a New Zealander and one of the ‘Queens of Crime’ alongside Dorothy L. Sayers, Agatha Christie and Margery Allingham in the 1920’s and 1930’s.
Her lifelong love of theatre and the arts is reflected in her novels - the characters and dialogue in this novel had a  theatrical feel at times and were a bit over the top. However, there's no mistaking her skill in crafting words. I thought her description of Barbara above was deftly done and showed a deep sensitivity to a young person trying to find her footing in the world.

Suitable for about ages 14/15 years and up. The only reference to anything objectionable is Dr Ackrington's remarks which I quoted above.

Linking to 2019 Back to the Classics: Classic From a Place You've Lived
Photographs were taken at the Waimangu Volcanic Valley in the North Island of New Zealand.