Artists in Crime

The novel opens aboard a passenger ship en route from New Zealand to Vancouver via Hawaii. Among the passengers are the painter Agatha Troy, who is painting the receding wharf at Suva (Fiji), discreetly observed by Scotland Yard's Inspector Roderick Alleyn returning from his previous case in New Zealand (ref the previous novel Vintage Murder [1]), who falls in love with Troy at first sight, but is pursued on the voyage by Miss van Maes, a brash, slightly boozy American, wealthy socialite and former film starlet. Letters back to England from Troy and Alleyn establish their hesitant initial acquaintance, until the story proper begins, back in the fictional Buckinghamshire village of Bossicote, where, by extraordinary coincidence, Alleyn is spending his final holidays with his mother Lady Alleyn, who just happens to live close by Troy's inherited country home, Tatler's End, where Troy is hosting and mentoring a group of private, fee-paying artists. They are using the purpose-built studio to paint from life Sonia Gluck, a beautiful but tiresome model, who is bizarrely murdered in a booby-trap consisting of a dagger thrust upwards through the 'throne' on which she is posing in an awkward supine position. The second murder, when it comes, is even more violently grotesque.

The Tatler's End artists (suspects) include: Troy herself, her gruff but loyal friend Katti Bostock, Francis Ormerin (a French sophisticate), Cedric Malmsley (an effete poseur in the Aubrey Beardsley style), Phillida Lee (a rather unconvincing, provincial would-be Bohemian and Communist), The Hon. Basil Pilgrim (son and heir of an eccentric, wealthy peer), Valmai Seacliff (a breathtaking, egocentric beauty in determined pursuit of Pilgrim), Watt Hatchett (a brash Australian with an artistic gift and a chip on his shoulder) and Wolf Garcia (an outstandingly talented but amoral, womanising sculptor). Troy is subsidising the last two in support of their work, and the romantic, sexual and social dynamics among the group provide the characteristic Marsh comedy of manners, against a convincingly drawn 1930s London Bohemia, temporarily translated to the more demure ambience of Troy's country home, complete (of course - this is 1938) with butler-chauffeur, cook, two live-in maids and a daily help from the village. When the model Sonia Gluck is murdered, during the life class, Garcia has already vanished, allegedly on a walking tour before completing his work on a sculpture commission at a borrowed London warehouse studio. His eventual reappearance is gruesomely sensational.

Alleyn solves the case, during which he struggles with his feelings for Troy, her distaste for his job, and the inevitable conflict between his personal and professional interests. The novel also gives the reader a more extended view than any other of the books, of Alleyn's family background and close relationship with his widowed mother, with whom he is staying as he solves the murder. Lady Alleyn never before or again figures so prominently in the series. Alleyn's usual 1930s support cast includes his devoted assistant Inspector Fox, his 'Watson' (the facetious journalist Nigel Bathgate) and the Yard team of Detective Sergeants Bailey (fingerprints) and Thompson (photography). Among the cast of support characters in this novel are the period's characteristic, awestruck rustic flatfoot (Superintendent Blackman) and Sonia Gluck's loyal, showbiz flatmate, Bobbie O'Dawne, from the chorus of the London musical 'Snappy'!

In the 1930s, the 'Golden Age Crime Queens' (with the notable exception of Agatha Christie, whose Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple did not lend themselves too credibly, perhaps, to a 'love interest') introduced romantic partners for their series detectives, who had begun their fictional careers in the classic bachelor pattern of Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson. Dorothy L Sayers' Lord Peter Wimsey met Harriet Vane in Strong Poison (1930) and by the final full-length Wimsey novel Busman's Honeymoon (1938), Sayers had married him off and effectively ended his career. Margery Allingham's Albert Campion charted a parallel romantic and matrimonial course through the 1930s, and in Artists In Crime, Ngaio Marsh introduced the painter Agatha Troy, with whom her detective Roderick Alleyn falls instantly and definitively in love.

Artists In Crime is very much Troy's book. Her reserved, independent character and status as a successful professional painter are established, from the opening scene, where she is first met by Alleyn (and the reader) painting the wharf at Suva from a departing ship's deck. ' "Damn!" said a female voice. "Damn, damn, damn! Oh, blast!" '.[2] The book's setting is Troy's professional world of artists in London's Bohemia. The murder takes place in the studio Troy has built in the garden of the country home she has inherited from her father, whom we learn had lost most of his money before dying. Although Troy clearly needs to earn her living and welcomes the substantial fees her artist students pay her, she lives comfortably in the world of the 1930s English upper classes, with her well-staffed country home, London club and Society friends. In this book, Troy has a suitor, John Bellasca, with whom she dines and lunches in town, although she shows no serious interest in him, and we learn quite a lot more about Troy, including her aversion to capital punishment and consequent difficulty dealing with Alleyn's occupation, a theme that crops up in further books. Alleyn is described by Marsh biographer Margaret Lewis [3] as "conduct[ing] his investigation in a state of hypersensitive apology. He gets his murderer, but is resigned to continue waiting for the woman he really wants, Agatha Troy." His courtship continues, in similarly awkward circumstances, in the next novel Death In A White Tie (1938), by which time Troy is living in London and seems to have sold or given up Tatler's End House (of which no more is heard), but the following two books Overture To Death (1939) and Death At The Bar (1940) show him engaged and duly married to Troy, with a child on the way, their only son Ricky, who appears as a six-year-old in Spinsters In Jeopardy (1954) and again, as a young writer and the principal narrator in Last Ditch (1977).

Dr Lewis mentions concerns by Marsh's literary agent, Edmund Cork (whose other clients included Agatha Christie) about Alleyn falling in love and marrying; "and contemporary reviewers", writes Dr Lewis, "wondered if he was going to become another Lord Peter Wimsey." There are self-evident similarities between the characters of Troy and Wimsey's Harriet Vane (a successful crime novelist). Both characters are modern, independent, professional, creative women (like their respective authors) and it is hard not to spot strikingly autobiographical aspects in them both. Dr Lewis reflects that the introductory "description in Artists In Crime of the tall figure of Troy, with her short, dark hair, thin face and hands, absent-minded, shy and funny, seems very close to the Ngaio Marsh who absorbed that scene [the wharf at Suva] on the way back to New Zealand in 1932 and who had then been painting seriously for over ten years." Like Dorothy L Sayers, Ngaio Marsh gives her detective hero and his wife an idealised and perfect marriage, although it features, on- and off-stage, so to speak, for the rest of a long series of Alleyn books, whereas Busman's Honeymoon is the final full-length Wimsey novel, after which Sayers gave only occasional glimpses in short stories or memorabilia of the Wimsey-Vane marriage and growing family.

A television episode in 1968 had Michael Allinson in the lead role.[4]

The novel was televised in 1990 as the pilot for the BBC TV series The Inspector Alleyn Mysteries, starring Simon Williams as Inspector Alleyn.

• Artists in Crime at IMDb