Marsh is a superb teller of tales, creating colorful characters with a greater sense of depth and motivation than does Christie, with whom she was contemporary. I generally don't read much narrative prose, but I do enjoy a good murder mystery, especially of the old 'who dunnit' genre. Troy and Alleyn's misunderstandings, and the rather melodramatic `Epilogue in a Garden' is fun to read and would have played well to the original readers it's full of dramatic tension and yet a little silly at the same time.

The relationship between Alleyn and his mother could not be written `straight' today: the `darlings' and `mammas' would be a joke in the 21st century, especially since Alleyn is not a young man at this point. The great thing is the language and style of the novel: slang terms, endearments, and descriptions of people are wonderfully appropriate to the time in which the novel first appeared. The plot is pretty procedural, although the identity of the murderer is kept hidden for quite awhile. An artist's model has been murdered, and there is literally a cast of suspects who had the motivation to `do her in', including Troy herself. After Alleyn and Troy meet on a ship sailing back to England from the South Pacific (and they do not meet well, although he is interested in her), Alleyn is called to investigate a murder at Troy's home conveniently down the road from his mother's. This novel, which relates the first meeting between Scotland Yard Inspector Roderick Alleyn and the artist Agatha Troy, is both a good mystery and a good picture of what kind of book was popular in the 1930s.

Artists in Crime by Ngaio Marsh