I am an Agatha Christie fanatic and have pretty much read all her books. In my search to read more books like Christie’s, I’ve come across Ngaio Marsh, a writer from New Zealand. Unfortunately, she is missing that special something that Christie has.
Marsh’s books Enter a Murderer and The Nursing Home Murder are straight marches from murder to revelation. The former is set in a theater house, while the latter is in the mentioned nursing home. Each book is filled with so many characters it’s hard to keep track of them, although Marsh’s signature detective, Roderick Alleyn, and his journalist sidekick Nigel Bathgate are constants.
Marsh’s books are intricately plotted, so if you are more interested in the puzzle than the characters, these books are for you. In Enter a Murderer, an actor who is supposed to be shot in a play is shot for real after someone replaces the prop gun’s blanks for real bullets. In The Nursing Home Murder, a government official is given an overdose during a standard operation, and everyone in the operating room is a suspect.
I have a terrible memory, so keeping track of all the characters in these books was a chore, and frankly I didn’t do a good job of it. The plot is written in a series of sequential steps, where the murder happens, the detective is brought in, the suspects are each questioned in detail, and then the crime is reconstructed by the detective to out the murderer. Both books were plotted exactly this way, along with many details about people’s locations during the murders, which didn’t add much except more confusion.
If you are looking for a cozy mystery, I suppose these fit the bill. But Marsh doesn’t have Christie’s flair for describing the psychology of each character, which I think makes a big difference in why I enjoy Christie’s books more. Christie is also better at setting a sinister milieu; as cozy as her mysteries are considered, there is usually a viable feeling of menace.