Ngaio Marsh was, among other things, a wel-respected theatrical producer (having started out as an actress), and her passion for and knowledge of the theater was displayed in many of Alleyn's adventures. In Enter a Murderer, the Inspector has been invited to an opening night, a new play in which two characters quarrel and then struggle for a gun, with predictably sad results. Even sadder, the gun was not, in fact, loaded with blanks.

There will always be an England, and in the world of traditional crime fiction, there will always be an Upper Quintern, the sort of Little English Village that is home mostly to the very rich and the servants who make their lives delightful. But Sybil Foster s life is not delightful, even if she does have an extremely talented gardener. Exhausted from her various family stresses a daughter, for instance, who wants to marry a man without a title Sybil takes herself off to a local hotel that specializes in soothing shattered nerves. When she s killed, Inspector Alleyn has a real puzzler on his...

As in her previous book, Grave Mistake, Ngaio Marsh offers up a lady of a certain age, high-strung and hyperventilating, two ticks short of neurosis. Photo Finish s dead diva, the soprano Isabella Sommita, was widely loathed, so much so that the problem is less a lack of plausible suspects than an embarrassment of options. Though the grand country-house and with it, the country-house murder was history by 1980, when Photo Finish was originally published, Dame Ngaio got around the problem by setting the story on a lavish island estate, cut off from the mainland by a sudden storm. Happily,...