From Laura LaVelle, Wonder Shuffle's Culture Editor

A Queen of Crime

Ngaio Marsh wrote 32 mysteries featuring Inspector Roderick Alleyn, starting with A Man Lay Dead in 1934. The first one isn't actually the best place to start with her work: it's a pretty typical country house murder story, and the detective plays second fiddle to the frankly annoying journalist character, Nigel Bathgate.

If you're a completist, you can begin there, of course, and eventually read them all in order, but if you'd just like to try one out, I'd recommend starting with Death in a White Tie, one of the highlights of the series.

Here we find both murder and blackmail among high society, and it's a rather intriguing look at the British artistocracy in the 1930s (including debutante balls and a great deal of scandalous behavior). It's also a treat (at least for those readers who like a bit of romance with their detective fiction) in that the detective finally makes some headway here with his love interest, the artist Agatha Troy.

Many of the Golden Age novels have extremely unlikeable murder victims---controlling patriarchs, cheating spouses, and so forth--and almost everyone is therefore a suspect because they're generally universally disliked. In this story, the dead man is quite popular, charming, and considerably brighter than he lets on, and there's more of a depth of feeling at his loss than in many otherwise similar stories. The plot is well done and intriguing, and of course, our hero does restore the social order and solve the crimes.

Other books I particularly enjoyed in this series are Death and the Dancing Footman (a house party goes seriously off the rails, in an intriguing WWII setting), A Surfeit of Lampreys (concerning a family of eccentrics, all of whom have a distant relationship with honesty, and murder in their midst), and Overture to Death (an amateur theatrical production goes very, very wrong) but they're generally all worth reading, I think. The series is mostly set in England, but there are several that take place in Marsh's native New Zealand as well. (I particularly enjoyed Colour Scheme involving espionage activity there.)

Along with Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, and Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh has been traditionally known as a "Queen of Crime," and she had a rather long career, with her final book published in 1982--with Inspector Alleyn still going strong and on the job after decades on the force.

NOVEL: Death in a White Tie

AUTHOR: Ngaio Marsh

YEAR OF PUBLICATION: 1938

IMAGE: book cover, Harper Collins