So many potential targets for so many reasons.
It’s a fabulous set-up, allowing the reader a bit of insight Alleyn doesn’t know yet, but also priming the tension for what is to come. The story continues with Nigel Bathgate, journalist, inviting his friend Detective Inspector Alleyn to a night at the theater and a chance to meet the crew before the show. It primes the reader for the confrontation, and gives initial insight into further interactions of the three. It opens with an unpleasant scene between producer Joseph Saint (born Simes) and his nephew, Arthur Surbonadier (also born Simes), followed by an equally unpleasant scene with Surbonadier and leading lady Stephanie Vaughan. Her knowledge of setting and characters is evident, and I can’t say that I thought any of it felt unrealistic or poorly done. To write it, she drew upon her knowledge of theater and the many types that surround the performing arts. Written in 1935, this was the second book for Ngaio Marsh, theater director and eventually one of the ‘greats’ in crime fiction writers. Alleyn marries a painter, Agatha Troy, whom he meets during an investigation (Artists in Crime), and who features in several later novels. Her short story "'I Can Find My Way Out" is also set around a theatrical production and is the earlier "Jupiter case" referred to in Opening Night. A number are set around theatrical productions (Enter a Murderer, Vintage Murder, Overture to Death, Opening Night, Death at the Dolphin, and Light Thickens), and two others are about actors off stage (Final Curtain and False Scent). Several novels feature Marsh's other loves, the theatre and painting. Before going back to her home country, she spent six months travelling about Europe.Īll her novels feature British CID detective Roderick Alleyn. In 1937 Marsh went to England for a period.
Throughout the 1930s Marsh painted occasionally, wrote plays for local repertory societies in New Zealand, and published detective novels. Marsh's first novel, A MAN LAY DEAD (1934), which she wrote in London in 1931-32, introduced the detective Inspector Roderick Alleyn: a combination of Sayers's Lord Peter Wimsey and a realistically depicted police official at work. She did not always see herself as a writer, but first planned a career as a painter. Over a fifty-year span, from 1932 to 1982, Marsh wrote thirty-two classic English detective novels, which gained international acclaim. Sayers, Ngaio Marsh alone survived to publish in the 1980s. Of all the "Great Ladies" of the English mystery's golden age, including Margery Allingham, Agatha Christie, and Dorothy L. There is some uncertainty over her birth date as her father neglected to register her birth until 1900, but she was born in the city of Christchurch, New Zealand. Dame Ngaio Marsh, born Edith Ngaio Marsh, was a New Zealand crime writer and theatre director.
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