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A Man Lay Dead
Ngaio Marsh
#UE8102
Paperback, 193 pages; 2011 (1934)
$14.95
 Members' Price: $12.71
The "Golden Age" of English crime fiction--roughly the 1920s through the 1940s--is widely understood to have had three queens: Margery Allingham, Agatha Christie, and Dorothy L. Sayers, with Josephine Tey as perhaps a grand duchess, and the sly, irrepressible Edmund Crispin a court jester. But only Ngaio Marsh was known as the Empress. Born in New Zealand, she wrote thirty-two novels featuring the very British inspector Roderick Alleyn. A Man Lay Dead, Alleyn's first outing, also features that hallmark of the Golden Age, the country-house party--a setting guaranteed to provide lots of suspects, lots of hiding places, and (from a contemporary reader's perspective) lots of really great clothes. Sadly, it's not providing much of interest for the guests, until Sir Hubert Handsley announces that he has devised a new and especially exciting version of that creaky old parlor entertainment, The Murder Game.
(MT)
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