False Scent

Indulged, egocentric Mary Bellamy, West End theatre star of light 'well-made' comedies rather than the grittier new style of Beckett, Osborne or Pinter, is celebrating her 50th birthday at her London home. She receives, in series, all her closest family and friends, each bearing presents, congratulations, gossip and news. These include: her wealthy businessman husband, an ageing former suitor, her adopted son (in whose first play, a light comedy, Mary starred), her former nanny and former dresser (two vinegary rivals) and three theatre colleagues - Mary's actress friend Pinky Cavendish, her favoured costume designer Bertie Saracen and the formidable theatre director Timon 'Timmy' Gantry (whose name and manner suggest the real-life director Tyrone Guthrie, whom Marsh knew and greatly admired). Their various news unsettle Mary, who succumbs to her increasingly uncontrollable temperament in a distressing series of tantrums and threats towards each and every one of them. As Pinky tells her: 'You're a cannibal, Mary, and it's high time somebody had the guts to tell you so'. Matters come to a head at the birthday party itself, attended by the press and cream of London theatre, when Mary turns viciously upon her adopted son and the unknown young actress he is in love with and for whom he has written his new play. Mary storms up to her bedroom and is found, dying horribly after spraying herself from a perfume-bottle someone has filled with toxic 'Slaypest' for potted plants. Roderick Alleyn investigates, interviewing the suspects, probing the tensions, hauling out skeletons from closets and identifying the murderer.

False Scent was well received and sold well, although biographer Joanne Drayton[1] describes it as a "cleverly characterized but, after Alleyn's investigation begins, rather inert novel", and writes of Marsh dramatising the novel with a great family friend Eileen Mackay for a Worthing repertory company ("she wrestled with what she believed was one of her weaker novels"), quoting Marsh's own typically modest comment: "I think the fault may well be that like so many of my books it falls between teckery [ as she termed her detective fiction ] and a comedy of manners." The novel's theatrical world and characters, as in many of Marsh's detective novels, are entirely convincing, offering two of the writer's most characteristic talents: a gruesomely ingenious murder method and plot in the classic whodunit style, along with an entertaining social comedy of manners.