One of the problems with being a compulsive reader is that you feel compelled to finish things that you’ve started. If, for example, you read one book by a favorite author, you then work your way methodically through your entire collection of their works. Which, if you are talking about someone like Edmund Crispin (~11) or Dorothy Sayers (~16) is bad enough – but when you get to Ngaio Marsh (33) or Agatha Christie (66+) is downright ridiculous and occupies way too much of your time and makes you late for work.

There are two ways you can work your way through a mystery series: you can read chronologically, which has certain advantages – for example, you become more forgiving of your author’s early attempts at writing and you can watch the detective evolve; or you can start with your absolute favorites and then go back to others that catch your fancy then march grimly through the ones that round out the series. A Man Lay Dead, for example, Ngaio Marsh’s first book, in which her hero detective is particularly annoying and she saddles him with that winsome ass, Nigel Bathgate, as a Watson, who luckily soon fades out of the books. When you read this one, you wonder that a publisher ever took a chance on her and think to yourself, I really should get organized and send my own work out, which is an annoying thought to be having when you are feeling particularly procrastinative.

This book, however, is a joy. It’s one of Marsh’s later books – Alleyn’s son is in college at this point – and her detective’s tendency to drone on and on in superior tones has mostly faded away and, when she does sometimes slip into her old ways, he pulls himself up with a bump and self-consciously wonders aloud why he is going on like that. In this book, she actually gives him a chance to lecture by framing the action in a class in detection that he is giving at Police College.¹ It is a surprising effective method – he manages to provide the backstory of a master criminal who specializes in art crime and drug trafficking and who murders those associates who dare to expose him.

Then the book cuts away to Alleyn’s wife, Troy is at loose ends, having just wrapped up an art show (she’s an artist) and with her son studying in France and Alleyn away in the U.S. meeting with police officers in major cities, attempting to track down the master criminal. Wandering aimlessly through the streets of the unfamiliar town, she passes a tour agency where a man is posting a note in a window about a last-minute availability for a canal boat tour leaving that afternoon. She seizes impulsively on that, grabs her suitcase from the hotel, and heads for the quay from where the boat will embark. There she meets her fellow passengers: an annoyingly self-obsessed woman who compulsively journals; a brash cockney slum landlord; a midwestern American sister and brother who seem to have stepped out of American Gothic; a strangely posh Australian cleric; a charming lepidopterist; and a Black British² man who is a medical doctor in Liverpool.

It is interesting that Ngaio Marsh includes black people in her books – this is one of several books which include a black man – because that’s pretty ground-breaking for the genre and the time that she was writing. Dorothy Sayers, Agatha Christie, Margery Allingham, the other queens of the golden age, wrote casts of characters that were unflinchingly white or, at best, included minor characters of other colors. Agatha Christie set a few books in the middle east, and included middle-eastern characters, some of which were main characters. Mary Roberts Rineheart talks about black laundresses putting down their irons and quitting, one after the other, following the third murder in the wealthy white neighborhood where they work. But, for the most part, the queens of mystery wrote about upper class or aristocratic people mostly living it country England, London, or Oxford; their audiences were, for the most part, white women at a time when most areas of Britan and the U.S. were still very segregated.

The world has gotten so diverse now that it may be hard for many white people to remember that there was a time that white people could go through their entire lives without meeting a black person, only reading about them in the newspapers or hearing about them on the news. Even when I was in school, decades after the golden age of mysteries, I went to school with maybe one or two black people who were but distant faces in the crowd, and I never had a real conversation with a black person until I moved to New York City.³ And yet Marsh, writing decades before that, takes it on, doing her best to represent these characters fairly. While the other characters in the story almost seem drawn like those caricatures that those artists along the boardwalk draw, where they boil you down to a few huge characteristics like a big hat and long eyelashes⁴, Marsh’s black characters are also two-dimensional – but more like the huge dark oil paintings with flashes of rich color that Troy Alleyn is known for painting.

Anyhow, at first Troy enjoys her barge cruise. The boat is cozy and charming. The towns they pass through are quaint. The river lazily winds back and forth, creating a strange stretched-out time that lulls her into a relaxed sort of dream state. But then, glancing up, a particular view reminds her of a painting by John Constable and she calls out, with lazy glee, “Oh look – the place is swarming with Constables! Everywhere you look – a perfect clutch of them.” And then there’s a curious silence as everyone seems to freeze and stare at her. Then a couple of people remark, “Policemen? Where?” or “What can you mean?”

And then strange and somewhat sinister things begin to happen. No one seems to notice but Troy and she takes advantage of an evening stop to call Scotland Yard and confide in her husband’s second in command, Inspector Fox. He admonishes her from sharing her suspicions on a public phone and asks if she will make an excuse to drop by the local police station instead. She does so, finding that Fox has alerted his old friend, the local chief of police, who pats her nicely on the head and sends her on her way, suggesting that she drop by the next station down the line. She feels that they aren’t taking her seriously, and writes her husband a long airmail letter, which she drops in the postbox the next day. But she keeps checking in at the local stations, and keeps finding that same chief of police there, patting her nicely on the hand and continuing to reassure her that her amassing suspicions all means nothing.

Until one of her fellow passengers disappears.

Even then, the police are still not taking her seriously. Fox has had to dash off to Paris in search for the master criminal, but Alleyn – having received her letters at lightening speed, for she is on this cruise less than a week and she is mailing the letters in a rural English town and her husband is in San Francisco and her letters are forwarded to him in Chicago, and he still receives them in time to change his itinerary and rush back to England to reach her just after they find the missing woman’s body, while Troy is still on her 5-day river cruise.

Wow, how sadly the postal service has declined since the late sixties.

The other interesting thing about this book is how the writing style shifts depending on whose perspective is being featured at the moment. When Alleyn is lecturing his students, and after he returns to England and takes over the investigation, the style is slightly dry, fact-based, the way he is. But when the story is following Troy, the writing is full of visual imagery, the way that you might imagine an artist’s eye constantly framing and reframing the world around them.

It’s a great book, well-written, unfolding clue after clue, like the boat wending it’s way through the turns of the river that folds back upon itself, until – after one last turn – the solution unfolds before you.

1. Which, in the US, we would call Police Academy. When policing first started, the forces were often filled with ex-con’s, thugs who could keep the peace. Somewhere in the late 19th Century, policing became “scientific” with the Lombaro Method and fingerprints and all that. Based on how they are portrayed in early murder mysteries, the earliest graduates of the Police Colleges were intellectuals who were taught the science of policing. They come off as somewhat effete compared to the thick-booted, large, somewhat comical older policemen whom they replaced. Now, of course, it is difficult to become a policeman unless you go through police academy. Or are elected Sheriff in, say, Arizona… Does it surprise you that early policemen were criminals? You do know that early ambulances were hearses? …hmm, maybe I’m not remembering that right… ↩︎
2. Which Google is trying to tell me is the British version of the term African American, and I’m not sure I’m buying it but trying to write the sentence without it would tie my grammar into knots; so I’m going to trust Google but I am very wary that this is an accepted term anymore. If there’s anyone in Britain reading, please verify for me here. In this case, the character’s father had moved to Britain from Ethiopia and married a white woman. The book takes place in the late 1960s so perhaps the term would have been appropriate at that time, even if it is not now. ↩︎
3. My apologies to the people who put up with my stupidity in those days. Ignorant, ignorant mistakes, made from lack of experience. ↩︎
4. The Americans, in particular, are honest-to-gosh straight-out-of Oklahoma rubes. ↩︎