divAn M.P. meets a woolly demise.Member of Parliament Florence Rubrick has the wool pulled over her eyes-quite literally. She's been found dead, her body pressed into a bale of wool. When Inspector Alleyn pays a visit to her New Zeala...

divIIt's All Fun and Games Until Someone Gets Murdered./At Sir Hubert Handesley's country house party, five guests have gathered for the uproarious parlor game of "Murder." Yet no one is laughing when the lights come up on a...

Ngaio Marsh was one of the queens (she has been called the empress) of England's Golden Age of mystery fiction. And in true Golden Age fashion, her oeuvre opens with, yes, a country-house party between the two world wars – servants ...

divAmateur actors set the stage for murder...Who in the quiet village of Chipping would kill wealthy spinster Idris Campanula? Plenty of people, among them her fellow cast members from a troubled charity production. Miss Campanula was...

The good ship Cape Farewell is steaming out to sea, with a passenger-list and crew fairly littered with the shifty, the twitchy, the peculiar, and the up-to-no-good. Arguably the up-to-no-goodest is a strangler with a romantic streak:...

A collection of short stories written by Ngaio Marsh; a number of them feature Inspector Alleyn, the protagonist of Marsh's famous mystery series. Included as well is a television script written by Marsh and the very first short story...

Colour Scheme is set during World War II at a mud-baths resort in New Zealand run by Colonel Claire. His business is on the brink of being taken over by a local blowhard who may be a Nazi spy. Inspector Alleyn has been sent to the res...

The unspeakably wealthy (and generally unspeakable) Jonathan Royal has decided to throw a party and, just for fun, has studded the guest-list with people who loathe one another. When a blizzard imprisons them all in Royal's country ho...

Ah, the London Debutante Season: Giggles and tea-dances, white dresses and inappropriate romances. And much too much champagne. And, apparently, a blackmailer, which is where Inspector Roderick Alleyn comes in. The social whirl is dec...

It's murder in the little English village, but the two local spinsters, Miss Campanula, the victim, and Miss Prentice, her friend who may have been the intended victim, are not exactly the beloved little old ladies of song and story. ...

For one unlucky Member of Parliament, a simple visit to the hospital (the "nursing home" of the title) proves fatal. But as Inspector Alleyn will discover, any number of people had reason to help the gentleman to his just re...

World War II rages on, and Inspector Alleyn continues as the Special Branch's eyes and ears in New Zealand. While his primary brief is spy-catching, he's also happy to help with old-fashioned policing. Flossie Rubrick, an influential ...

There will always be an England, and in the world of traditional crime fiction, there will always be an Upper Quintern, the sort of Little English Village that is home mostly to the very rich and the servants who make their lives deli...

In the movies, it's known as a "meet cute." But for Inspector Alleyn and Miss Agatha Troy, it's more like irritation: On the ship back to England, she finds him tedious and dull; he thinks she's a bohemian cliche. They may b...

Ng'ombwana is a (fictional) African nation to have emerged in the wake of colonialism; as it happens, its President is Inspector Alleyn's old school chum, the "Boomer." Old school ties being what they are, the Boomer—makin...

We do love a man in a uniform, but the "Constables" in question are not policemen but paintings—the landscapes, specifically, of the 19th-century painter John Constable. Agatha Troy (the artist wife, you'll remember, of In...

The elderly Emily Pride is perfectly pleased to have inherited an island, even if her starchy pragmatism is ever-so-faintly appalled by the "Pixie Falls" spring and its reported miraculous healing properties. But really, the...

It's true, darts is nobody's idea of a low-risk amusement, yet it is rarely lethal. Tell that to the famous barrister who was enjoying a pint at the Plume of Feathers pub, and is now residing at the morgue. Inspector Roderick Alleyn h...

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The village of South Mardian likes the old ways. This may be 1957, but South M. still features a blacksmith, a village idiot, and an elaborate fertility ritual performed at the winter solstice. There's squabbling, of course, and thing...

Ngaio Marsh was, among other things, a well-respected theatrical producer (having started out as an actress), and her passion for and knowledge of the theater was displayed in many of Alleyn's adventures. In Enter a Murderer, the Insp...

Mary Bellamy is the sweetheart of the London stage, fluffy as only an elderly lady of 50(!) can be. Her fans and friends—and who didn't adore, positively adore darling Mary?—are heartbroken when somehow Mary manages to spritz hers...

A delicious, classic country-house mystery. Sir Henry Ancred, a celebrated Shakespearian actor, has arranged to have his portrait painted by Agatha Troy wife of Inspector Roderick Alleyn. She's rather glad to be stepping out of Alleyn...

One has to admit that the timing was peculiar. No one could doubt that Mr. Percival Pyke Period was genuinely distraught to hear that his neighbor, Harry Cartell, had turned up dead in a ditch. But how is it that Mr. Percival Pyke cam...

The impresario Peregrine Jay has fulfilled a long-cherished dream: Thanks to a very generous gift, he now owns the Dolphin Theatre, and has restored it to its former glory. To celebrate the re-opening, a no-expenses-spared production ...

Ricky Alleyn – perhaps you know his father, Roderick? – first appeared in Spinsters in Jeopardy, as a child. He's now 21, and has taken himself off to a secluded island to write a novel. Or think about writing a novel. Or look for...

The bad news: This is the last in Ngaio Marsh's marvelous "Inspector Alleyn" series. The good: It's one of her very best. The secret to Light Thickens' success may lie in its combination of some of Marsh's greatest passions,...

Inspector Alleyn just wants to write a letter to his wife, but World War II, for one, keeps intruding. It's war-work, after all, that has brought Alleyn to this seedy hospital in New Zealand's hinterlands, and it's the war that has le...

The shabby Vulcan theater is not where Martyn Tarne hoped to work when she moved from New Zealand to London to pursue an acting career. But Martyn takes a job as dresser to the Vulcan's leading lady. This provides her with a ringside ...

As in her previous book, Grave Mistake, Ngaio Marsh offers up a lady of a certain age, high-strung and hyperventilating, two ticks short of neurosis. Photo Finish's dead diva, the soprano Isabella Sommita, was widely loathed, so much ...