Death in Ecstasy by Ngaio Marsh
A Classic Inspector Alleyn Murder Mystery from the Golden Age
Ngaio Marsh blends murder, religion and skulduggery into a puzzling mix in this 1930s whodunnit.
Death In Ecstasy is a murder mystery from the so-called “golden age” of the whodunnit. It was written in 1936 by Ngaio Marsh, one of the grande dames of the genre, and features her sleuth Inspector Roderick Alleyn. The plot centres around a murder at a cultish religious meeting in London, and the chicanery, drug-dealing and deception which have been going on amongst the cult’s members.
Though not an amateur detective in the mold of Dorothy L. Sayers’ Sir Peter Wimsey, Roderick Alleyn is nonetheless a gentleman (having attended Eton and spent some time in the Diplomatic Service before joining the police), and the range of his rather fanciful verbal style spreads from Lewis Carroll to Hamlet. His long speeches to his more stolid sidekick Fox display a playfulness and elaboration unusual in the genre.
In keeping with the protagonists’ level of literary reference, the book’s style is highly self-conscious. One character tells the Alleyn “You certainly are the goods. I guess you’ve got British Manufacture stamped some place where it won’t wear off. All this quiet deprecation – it’s direct from a sure-fire British best-seller. I can’t hardly believe it’s true.”
Even more audacious is a discussion held on page 141 of a novel 256 pages long: “Look here...let’s pretend this is a detective novel. Where would be by this time? About half-way through, I should think. Well, who’s your pick?”. One character answers that he’s always fooled by the red herrings in detective novels, another opines that “it depends upon the author”, and describes which of the suspects would be guilty if the novel they were in was by Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers or Freeman Wills Croft.
Such self-awareness would surely be damaging in a more serious genre, but in a “cozy” detective story of the golden age, it merely adds another level to the “game” of detection. At times, Alleyn appears to be dragging himself back from simply making speeches for the sake of it – “I do well, don’t I, to sit here being a funny-man, and not so damn’ funny either, whilst a beautiful woman turns into a cadaver, an analyst’s exercise, and her murderer – ?”
However, in the next-but-one sentence he is adapting a line from Hamlet and bantering Fox for being “too nice-minded” and “such a wise old bird”. The occasional expression of serious emotion seems mostly designed to assure the reader of Alleyn’s basic good faith, so they can enjoy the puzzle and his verbal elaborations. Despite the fact that it contains a murder, a heroin addict and a religious cult, Death in Ecstasy is a traditional cheery whodunnit which sets the world to rights again with the last few pages.
