Customer Reviews

Last Ditch

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is an Inspector Roderick Alleyn/Detective Fox entry. It's very late in Alleyn's career because he and his renowned artist wife, Agatha Troy, have a grown son, Ricky, who has traveled to an artist's retreat of sorts to write.

Ricky mixes with the locals which include a family of equestrians. The daughter, a concupiscent gal of local popularity with all the young men, is killed in a horse-riding episode. Ricky suspects that her death may not have been an accident based upon feedback from local residents.

Ricky also gets involved with a sarcastic aspiring young artist who appears to be involved in the drug trade. Subsequent to Rickey being involved in a near drowning, Alleyn and Fox show up to look into the drug allegations and the possible murder of the girl... then Rickey goes missing!

The scenario here is not the most believable cozy murder that Marsh ever wrote. Still I enjoyed it and can recommend it to fans.

This is one of the very latest Marsh books, written in 1977. (43 years after her first book!)

The story centers around Ricky Alleyn, the son of Roderick and Agatha Troy. In this book, he is twenty-one and striking out on his own for the very first time. Despite the best effort of both parents to keep him away from the world of crime, Ricky gets drawn into a local murder. Although Roderick is eventually sent to help his son out, Ricky remains at the center of the piece.

I actually did not mind Ricky as the central character. He has some interesting tensions and I could have seen him go on in later works to follow in his father's footsteps despite the wishes of his parents. That said, these tensions are not well developed in Last Ditch and Ricky remains betwixt and between with Roderick still shouldering most of the responsibility for the crime.

It would also have been interesting to see an aging Roderick less able to cope with the modern world of drugs and promiscuity. But Alleyn seems surprisingly unchanged, despite having a 21 year old son. He adjusts to the junkies and smuggling with ease.

Unfortunately, the world of drugs and junkies described here fails to ring true. It reads like second-hand stereotype rather than something from reality.

All this makes it sound like a bad book. It is not. Particularly for Marsh fans, there are still those moments of brilliance that characterize so much of her work. Julia Pharamond is a brilliant character, for instance. Her dizzy complexity and cold kindness makes her a classic Marsh character. I would not begin here if you haven't read any other Marsh, but if you are already a fan I would not be afraid to pick it up either.

I'm a big fan of cozy mysteries and I picked this novel up because I thought that it would be similar to Agatha Christie's work. I'm in my mid-40's now, but I can remember my mom reading Ngaio Marsh novels as a kid in the '70's. This is the 1st Marsh novel I've ever read and, based on what others have stated, perhaps it shouldn't have been. The characters are very simple and 2-dimensional. Inspector Alleyn and his wife Troy are like Ozzie & Harriet (Nelson). Their son, Ricky, is like...well Ricky Nelson. The characters are so predictable that there is never any mystery as to what they're up to (drug smuggling). I kept waiting for plot twists and turns that never came. In the end, the murderer revealed himself to the police out of guilt. As a reader I felt gypped that he wasn't found out due to clever sleuthing.

As of this date, the previous (three) reviews of the book seem to have been for one of the printed copies, not the audio copy which I heard. I have not read the book and cannot comment on how it reads. As an audio book, excising the technical problems I had, which have nothing to do with the reader (Nadia May, one of the names taken for audio work by British actress and TV personality,Nadia Sawalha), was a good mystery with an interesting cast of characters, given distinct voices and considerable appeal by the Reader. The details of the action have already been spelled out by Amazon and previous reviewers, but their reception to the book's content is difficult for me to reconcile with what I heard. To what extent this is a personal matter not a difference between reading a text and hearing a text performed, even though word for word a duplication of the text, I cannot say. There is probably research on this intriguing problem in the literature but I have no inclination to seek it out. Suffice it to say, that my recommendation, that it will probably be enjoyed by any Marsh fan and most detective story readers, is based on the audio edition alone.
I refrain from comment on various points made by reviews of the "reading" group except to suggest that placing the work of Dame Ngaio in the recently devised "cozy" category doesn't fit in with my conception of "cozy" (many series within which group I enjoy) or my conception of Marsh's books.

I am an avid Marsh reader. I truly think she's one of the all-time greats. Her characters are delicately and consistently portrayed. Roderick Alleyn, his wife Troy, his sidekick Inspector Fox---sublime. I really love her books because each one stands alone as a sort of mini-novel: a member of the mystery genre, but with creative detail and insights that you're not usually going to find outside serious novels.

Having said that: this book sucks. Ricky Alleyn is one of the most annoying and deadly stupid characters ever depicted anywhere. And since the book revolves around him, it's hard to skim the bits he's in.

Skip this one and read Overture to Death instead.

Pretty good book.
Marsh usually starts us off with characters who are not Alleyn, but here we have his son Ricky, on a writing holiday. As Alleyn's progeny, Ricky is rather tiresome in his endlessly correct behavior. He falls for a local married woman several years his senior. Meanwhile, there's a murder!
I like how the author is ambitious in changing scenery between books, and here she gives us a coastal village with a French-speaking populace.
She is fairly successful with the villains in this novel, but there are not too many surprises. I don't read Marsh for the "denouement" - I read for the story itself and her amazing writing and dialogue.