Appointment With Agatha discussion

Christine PNW asked me in our main "side reads themes" thread to come up with a list of my favorite Marsh mysteries that have a theatrical setting, matching our main Christie read for that month, Lord Edgware Dies. I'm not sure when voting will be opened up for our October side read (Christine?), but either way, here's my list -- with the one note that I've taken "theatre" to mean "performance of any kind", as some of Marsh's best mysteries with that kind of setting don't actually feature the production of a (spoken) play -- or not only a play -- but instead or in addition some sort of musical element. (Links to the respective Goodreads pages in the paragraph headlines.)

MY TOP 5
All of these are great introductions to Marsh's work as such as well as to her theatre mysteries; in a few cases also to some of her other major settings, with which she would combine her theatre / stage mysteries every so often (English villages or country houses, New Zealand, etc.).

Final Curtain
One-Sentence Synopsis: Exit, stage right and very unexpectedly so, at his countryside estate, one of the titans of English theatre; leaving behind his not very bereaved clan -- and a portrait painted by Agatha Troy.
Comments: Theatrical setting meets English country house mystery; bickering heirs, young trophy wife, wills and all. This is a good introduction to both Inspector Roderick Alleyn* and his wife, painter Agatha Troy; and it's also a glorious (though at heart good-natured) satire of actors and their mannerisms. One of the stand-out characters is the family's enfant terrible, the ageing titan's granddaughter.
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* Note: The name is pronounced ALLen -- the character is named for Elizabethan actor Edward "Ned" Alleyn, the founder of Dulwich College, which Marsh's father had attended, and which she had visited on the afternoon of the day when she sat down and started writing her first Inspector Alleyn mystery.

Death At The Dolphin (aka Killer Dolphin)
One-Sentence Synopsis: An aspiring young director's grand plans for the reopening of a war-ravaged, formerly renowned London theatre with a play featuring a glove once owned by Shakespeare's son Hamnet (or was it?) are brought to a crashing halt by murder.
Comments: One of the plays where Marsh brings together a mystery plot and the world of Shakespearean theatre, which was very much her own when she wasn't writing Inspector Alleyn novels. It comes with the territory that there's a bit of Shakespeare talk here (besides the quotations from the Bard with which Marsh peppers virtually all her mysteries); but all you really have to know is that Hamnet Shakespeare -- with his twin sister Judith, one of William Shakespeare's two younger children, after their elder sister Susanna -- died at age 11 in Stratford-upon-Avon, under circumstances not fully known today, when his father was already established as a playwright in London. There is a belief that Shakespeare's grief over the loss of his son translated into the stirring death scenes in some of his plays, e.g., King John and Romeo and Juliet; however, the play featuring in Marsh's mystery is a fictitious one.

Overture to Death
One-Sentence Synopsis: Murder by piano during what was to be the overture to amateur theatricals at a village fête, with a leitmotif of bickering elderly and middle-aged ladies.
Comments: Also a good introduction to Marsh's English village mysteries, Like in many of her novels featuring the world of the theatre (though not Final Curtain, which doesn't feature a performance at all), Marsh doesn't drop us into our seats as spectators on opening night but, rather, lets us in -- in therapeutic doses -- on the rehearsing process and the other work going into the planning and preparation of the performance. Also, like virtually all of Marsh's novels set in the world of the theatre and / or in English villages, character, both straightforward and satirized, is set at a premium in her writing.

Off With His Head (aka Death of a Fool)
One-Sentence Synopsis: A traditional rural winter solstice Morris dance-cum-mummery play with all the trimmings and traditional characters -- plus the headless corpse of the dancers' cantankerous star performer, the owner of the village forge.
Comments: As in Overture to Death, Mayhem Parva meets the performing arts. The book was written shortly after WWII; like many of Marsh's other village and country house mysteries, it is in part inspired by her stays with a well-born family who had been her close friends since their New Zealand days (and who also inspired the central characters in (at least) one of Marsh's London mysteries, A Surfeit of Lampreys, aka Death of a Peer). But the book also shows the effects of the war, as exemplified by a mildly eccentric German Jewish refugee character desperately trying to be more British than the Brits in order to fit in -- on the face of it, like many of Marsh's characters a bit of a (benign) caricature, but Marsh had seen the persecution of Jews in Germany with her own eyes before WWII, and she was also aware of the doings of Oswald Mosley and his ilk: this isn't the only WWII or post-WWII mystery where she alludes to the politics of the day (even if only cautiously; to be more explicit would, in her view, have gone against what she saw as the established, formulaic rules of mystery writing).

Photo Finish
One-Sentence Synopsis: "La Sommita"'s voice soars to her famous, impossibly high "A above high C" for the last time during a private performance on her American millionaire patron's private New Zealand island estate; with Alleyn and Troy in attendance (one in New Zealand to investigate a photographic smear campaign against the soprano, the other to paint the diva's portrait).
Comments: One of Marsh's final mysteries; the magnificent mountain lake / island setting is based on a place in the mountains of NZ's South Island that Marsh had first visited in her youth, as an arts student, and had loved ever since. "La Sommita" is, according to Marsh herself, based on Maria Callas; and the portrayal is not a favorable one: Marsh knew divas of all branches of the stage inside out, and she had absolutely no time for them. -- The reason for Alleyn's presence is perhaps a bit contrived even within a "colonial" understanding of the British Commonwealth, and Marsh has recourse to the "island isolated by a storm" trope to make it feasible for Alleyn to have to conduct a "place holder" investigation for the local cops (themselves stuck on the lake shore); but then, if Christie used it in And Then There Were None ...


3 SUPPLEMENTARY SUGGESTIONS
These come with a few caveats, but none that touch on the theatrical setting as such, and as an introduction to that type of her mysteries they still work well.

Light Thickens
One-Sentence Synopsis: Back at London's Dolphin Theatre for another Shakespeare performance -- and maybe it would have been a better idea to use stage weapons instead of real claymores for that production of Shakespeare's "unlucky" play, Macbeth ...
Comments: Marsh's final mystery and one of my personal favorites, but this one really is only going to work for you if you're also into Shakespeare (or at any rate, reasonably familiar with Macbeth at the very least -- and a bit of general familiarity with Shakespeare won't go awry, either). This is Marsh's final paean to the Bard, bringing together the world of the theatre and the world of mystery writing in a more pronounced way than ever before. So this may not work for you if you chiefly in it for the mystery contents -- the murder only happens halfway into the book; until then we're treated to a loving contemplation of Shakespeare's legacy in general, Macbeth in particular, and all the major issues of bringing it to the stage.

Enter a Murderer
One-Sentence Synopsis: Murder on stage: the première ... but was it really murder to begin with?
Comments: Marsh's second book, and the first time she used a theatrical setting. It's fairly noticeably part of what I call her "mystery writer apprentice" phase (most of all, she hadn't quite found her "Alleyn" character feet yet), but the mystery as such hangs together nicely, and it's obvious from the start how much she was interested in the larger than life appearance of actors, both on and off the stage. There are several hot candidates for the role of the victim, and the one who eventually wins the "prize" of being done to death on open stage really does have it coming to them. From the start, too, Marsh makes great use of the fact that the theatre is a world of half-truths and make-believe; not only with regard to the actors' behavior but also with regard to such things as props and stage setting.

Opening Night (aka Night at the Vulcan)
One-Sentence Synopsis: "Little girl lost" -- a young New Zealander lost in the world of the London theatres -- seems to have struck it lucky at last ... but then murder gets in the way and seems to spoil it all.
Comments: Like the non-theatre mystery A Surfeit of Lampreys (referenced above in connection with Off With His Head), this book has autobiographical overtones; in two respects: first, for featuring a young female POV character recently arrived in London from NZ for the first time; second, in what I suspect at one point was a scenario that a very young Ngaio Marsh might have wished for concerning her own very first theatrical mentor, a very well known actor director named Alan Wilkie then on tour in New Zealand. If you don't mind the occasional fairy tale tinges, the mystery as such is solidly crafted and showcases everything that Marsh excelled at in theatrical settings -- larger than life characters, clever use of stage settings and props, etc.

This is great - thank you! I love it, and I think we should definitely pair one of these "theatrical" murders with Lord Edgware Dies.

Christine PNW wrote: "This is great - thank you! I love it, and I think we should definitely pair one of these "theatrical" murders with Lord Edgware Dies."

You're welcome; great I could help. Now I only hope most people are going to like the one we're eventually going to pick!

Can't go wrong with any of these choices.

Since we have a little extra time, I'm going do a preliminary poll with all eight of the choices, and if we don't have a clear favorite (and when do we ever have a clear favorite), I'm going to do a run-off with the top three or four.

Christine PNW wrote: "Since we have a little extra time, I'm going do a preliminary poll with all eight of the choices, and if we don't have a clear favorite (and when do we ever have a clear favorite), I'm going to do ..."

Sounds good!

Back to this question - Our top 4 books all ended up very close in terms of polling.

Enter a Murderer: 5 votes
Killer Dolphin: 5 votes
Final Curtain: 4 votes
Night at the Vulcan: 4 votes

In addition, these four books got almost all of the votes, with only 3 votes to the other 4 books, which means that we were very evenly split.

So, I have a few thoughts:

1. We choose from the top 2 only;
2. We read the book of our choice from that group of 4, and engage in a mostly spoiler-free discussion.
3. We designate Enter a Murderer as the monthly read (since it's the second book in the Alleyn series), but members who have already read it (since it is book 2, I think it's likely that several of us have already read it) can read Death at the Dolphin as an alternative selection, and the discussion will cover both books. This risks spoilers, but I think we can manage that issue.

Thoughts?

Works for me!

BrokenTune wrote: "Works for me!"

All of them? Any of them? Do you have a preference? :)

Christine PNW wrote: "BrokenTune wrote: "Works for me!"

All of them? Any of them? Do you have a preference? :)"

Work all of them in. :) There seems to have been support for all of them.

As the person who pre-selected all of the books I should probably not claim a voice in this -- what I can, perhaps, say is that while my original selection covered a number of very different types of books and settings, three of the four remaining candidates are substantially similar in setting, topic and tone, with only Final Curtain standing out as noticeably different. *

So if we're looking at options allowing for more than one book, my suggestion would be to pair off Final Curtain with either / any one of the other three -- or to go with your option no. 2, Christine, and just let everybody pick whichever one of the four books they want to read -- so as to maybe sample a wider array of responses?
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* Enter a Murderer, Opening Night (= Night at the Vulcan) and Death at the Dolphin (= Killer Dolphin) are all set at (fictional) London theatres and feature the production of a specific play, from rehearsal to opening night, with the cast and other persons involved in the production supplying both the victim and making up the group of primary suspects, and with Marsh using this setting to, on the one hand, introduce the reader to what goes into the production of a(ny and all) play(s) and also, in the process, having her bit of well-meaning fun with the world of the theatre, and with actors in particular. What essentially distinguishes these three novels is:

* Marsh's own skill level as a mystery writer (weakest, IMHO, and unsurprisingly so, in Enter a Murderer),
* the significance of the romance element included (most pronounced in Opening Night, aka Night at the Vulcan) and
* the level of Shakespeare-related content (highest in Death at the Dolphin, aka Killer Dolphin, though there is some amount of Shakespeareana in all of Marsh's theatre mysteries).

Final Curtain OTOH is not set at a theatre but at the country residence of England's (fictional) greatest actor (think Henry Irving or Laurence Olivier for the type), who has retired from the stage and commissioned Alleyn's wife Agatha Troy to paint a portrait of him in his greatest role, Macbeth, using the small theatre in his residence for background. The cast of suspects essentially consists of his family -- most of whom have theatrical affiliations of sorts, too, but the setting and cast of characters are still noticeably different than in the other three books. Also, this is the only one of the four books where Troy plays a significant role. In tone, the satire (and implied criticism: Marsh had no time for superstars and spoiled rich brats) is more pronounced here than it is in the other three books, too.

So long story short: It may not make much of a difference which of the three books with actual theatre settings we pick; individual responses to the setting, characters and tone would likely be similar in all three cases and what differences of opinion / response there are would arise more from the three more noticeably distinguishing factors listed above. It would conceivably make a difference whether we pick either of these three books or Final Curtain, though.

Christine PNW wrote: "Back to this question - Our top 4 books all ended up very close in terms of polling.

Enter a Murderer: 5 votes
Killer Dolphin: 5 votes
Final Curtain: ..."

I like option 2! I typically read 2 or 3 of each month’s side reads; it would be delightful to hear others’ thoughts on all four of the Marsh books.

Marie wrote: "I like option 2! I typically read 2 or 3 of each month’s side reads; it would be delightful to hear others’ thoughts on all four of the Marsh books.."

That's what I'm leaning towards, too. Part of it is selfish - I just read Enter a Murderer in January, and the other ones all look REALLY GOOD!

If we read more than one title, perhaps we could have one thread spoiler-free for general discussion of all the books and then a spoiler thread for a deeper dive into each book individually.

Peregrina651 wrote: "If we read more than one title, perhaps we could have one thread spoiler-free for general discussion of all the books and then a spoiler thread for a deeper dive into each book individually."

I like that idea.

OK - we're going to go with option 2. For October, it's "reader's choice" from the four highest scoring options.

Awesome. I think I have three of them.

I just got 2 from the used bookstore for 75 cents each :-)

I think this will be fun! Again, just to be clear, our October side read is a festival of theatrical mysteries by Ngaio Marsh. Anyone interested in participating can read one (or more) of the following four mysteries:

Enter a Murderer
Death At The Dolphin (alternative title Killer Dolphin)
Opening Night (alternative title Night at the Vulcan)
Final Curtain

In terms of structure, there will be a single spoiler thread for everyone to indicate which book they are reading and their general (non-spoilerific) thoughts. I will also open an individual spoiler thread for each book to discuss them in more detail!

For readers who might want to read more than one book, feel free to start early, since this will make October a potential 5 book month. I will open the "no-spoilers" thread in September.