Hand in Glove by Ngaio Marsh
An Entertaining Whodunnit Featuring Roderick Alleyn
Ngaio Marsh's detective novel "Hand in Glove" provides the traditional mixture of clues, alibis, and entertaining snobbery.
Hand in Glove is a classic murder mystery by the New Zealand novelist Ngaio Marsh. Published in 1962, it features Marsh’s sleuth Roderick Alleyn and his wife, the painter Agatha Troy.
Clues and Denouement
Though written in the 1960s, Hand in Glove follows all the conventions of the traditional whodunnit. Even before the murder happens the victim doesn’t stand out as a particularly strong character, the investigation involves unravelling a series of clues and the timings of people’s movements on the “fatal night”, and there is a romantic subplot involving one of the characters who could have committed the murder, though he is never seriously a suspect. The novel even finishes with a denouement in which all the suspects are gathered together and their motives and opportunities are described in turn, before the identity of the guilty part is revealed.
Signs of the Times
Rather than elaborating the form of the murder mystery, Marsh takes advantage of the somewhat freer range of the 1960s novel to spell out a little further what would have been only hinted at in the 1930s or 40s. The “absolute cad” Leonard Leiss is clearly shown to be sleeping with his girlfriend, Roderick Alleyn is revolted by one character’s support for the death penalty, and Nicola Maitland-Mayne feels it necessary to make it clear than when she and Andrew Bantling disappeared from the party, they spent the time talking and did not “have a casual affair.” There’s an entertaining moment when Mr. Belt the valet lets in Mr. Cartell’s detested dog: “’Bitch!’ Alfred said factually, but with feeling.”
Snobbery with Violence
The classic whodunnit has been characterised as “snobbery with violence”, and Ngaio Marsh plays around with the notion of social snobbery in her novels generally, and Hand in Glove in particular. She is fond of juxtaposing the fact that many people assume that Roderick Alleyn cannot be a gentleman, since he is a policeman, with the truth that his brother is a baronet. (One of the central characters, Percival Pyke Period, is a huge snob who has faked his ancestry to claim membership in an old family, and is apparently genuinely distressed by bad table manners and low company.) Marsh has plenty of fun with such attitudes, which must have seemed more reasonably when the detective novel originated – there was no suggestion that characters like Inspector Lestrade or Sergeant Cuff, for example, could have remotely the same background as their middle- and upper-class suspects.
Unashamedly in the classic detective novel tradition, Ngaio Marsh’s Hand in Glove is nonetheless aware that it is part of a rigid set of conventions – though it does not flaunt the fact as obviously as Death in Ecstasy, another of her novels.
