Not for nothing are the 1930s called the "Golden Age" of detective fiction, and there were plenty to choose from when filling out my list of books for the 1937 Club! I decided to go with authors I had not yet read, though I admit that when it came down to the wire, I ended up rather sentimentally plumping for ones I'm already somewhat familiar with through television series, Ngaio Marsh and Margery Allingham. Vintage Murder is the fifth of Marsh's Inspector Roderick Alleyn mysteries, and it finds Alleyn on holiday in New Zealand, traveling by train. With him, as it happens, is a touring theatrical-comedy company, headed by Carolyn Dacres, and managed by her husband Alfred Meyer and his business partner. The company consists of eight actors as well as a handful of behind-the-scenes members, offering Alleyn a variety of personalities to observe during a mostly-sleepless night. Once set up in their temporary home at the Theatre Royal, Meyer has planned a surprise for his wife's birthday party after a performance, in which a jeroboam of champagne will descend from above the stage into a basket held in Meyer's waiting arms -- and although this has been rehearsed repeatedly throughout the day, it goes horribly wrong during the party. Alleyn is more-or-less incognito as a visitor, but of course being on the scene naturally brings out the detective-inspector in him.
(I did not know, as it happens, how big a jeroboam of champagne is -- it is, depending on who you ask, either three liters or four and a half, thus about four times the size of a standard bottle. I had the impression from the events leading up to it and from the party itself that it was much bigger -- "a fabulous, a monstrous bottle" -- but I suppose that even one merely as long as my arm (!) would be pretty deadly if dropped from a great height.)
Marsh's writing style is easy and fluid, with touches of humor more often from dialogue than in description. She clearly knows her way around a theatre -- in fact, it was one of her greatest passions, having in her early twenties joined a New Zealand touring company, the start of a lifelong association with theatre, producing and directing especially in New Zealand. All of her books, over thirty in the course of her career, feature Alleyn. I admit that I haven't particularly warmed to him -- of the television series, I've seen a few episodes of Patrick Malahide's version and Simon Williams' single outing (in that order, and I rather prefer Williams) -- but I think this is actually the first book Alleyn I've read. Vintage Murder does not in fact appear on at least two "best of Ngaio Marsh" lists (Murder & Mayhem's and Novel Suspect's), so I will definitely add some of those to my list of potential reads!
(This book, by the way, wins the prize for the most-boring first-edition dust jacket of my 1937 Club week. How it annoys me that the bottle isn't even centered below the title!)
Links to other readers' reviews of books published in 1937 can be found here.
Do you follow Kate Davies' blog? She is building a summer club around Margery Allingham. She chose 10 of her Campion novels as a book club.
Posted by: dawninnl | April 21, 2024 at 01:10 AM