Customer Reviews

The Nursing Home Murder

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

 

 

Ngaio Marsh is among the great mystery novelists of the 20th Century--but like many another writer she went through an aprentice period. Both A MAN LAY DEAD and ENTER A MURDER were fairly well received when they were published in the early 1930s, but it wasn't until the 1935 publication of THE NURSING HOME MURDER that the reading public began to take notice.

England's Home Secretary is on the eve of both important political watersheds and not a few personal developments when he is suddenly taken ill and rushed into surgery. But what should be a simple operation finds him dead on the table, and at least two two of those in attendance had good reason to wish him out of the picture. Inspector Alleyn has his hands full with doctors, nurses, lawyers and such--and just possibly a political assassin lurking in the background.

This is the first Marsh novel in which Inspector Alleyn truly emerges as a memorable personality--and in which Marsh begins to show her talent for both characterization and setting. The plot is also quite striking, and medical technology aside the novel has a remarkably modern feel. Marsh would go on to do better works, but that doesn't undercut this particular title, which is quite fine. Recommended.

GFT, Amazon Reviewer

With technical assistance from Dr. H. Jellett, Ngaio March produced this good Puzzle story for readers to test their wits with--setting it in a "nursing home," where people rightfully expect to be helped by the staff, not murdered by any of them.

The title, THE NURSING HOME MURDER, probably will confuse most U.S. readers, who associate the term "nursing home" with the places that elderly people are put so that they can have professional nursing care 24/7. In the U.K., however, the term has a very different meaning--here in Marsh's detective novel, it refers to a small private hospital where surgery is performed.

When a high-ranking British government official dies shortly after an emergency operation, Marsh's series detective, Roderick Alleyn (pronounced "Allen"), receives suspicious information from the man's widow and agrees that the matter ought to be investigated fully. It soon is clear that the dead man was given a fatal overdose of medicine by somebody, either right before or during the surgery. And so, chapter by chapter, Inspector Alleyn interviews everyone associated with the case--and three main suspects quickly come to light.

Are you clever when it comes to spotting clues and weighing evidence? Are you good at assessing people's personalities? Perhaps you can solve this case before Inspector Alleyn does.

For the most part, Marsh plays fair with readers, and you have a good chance of getting at least 85% of the solution right. A few things ARE withheld, and even Alleyn admits that luck played a part in his getting the evidence he needed. Since this can be seen as a flaw in the story, perhaps it is why I've rated this book 4 stars instead of 5.

Otherwise, on the plus side, Marsh provides us with an interesting cast of well-developed characters--AND she occasionally has some of them say amusing things.

If you happen to buy the hardback copy published by Aeonian Press in 1977, be warned that it has many typos of all sorts. Perhaps you can consider that as an extra cryptographic challenge to your brain: adding in correct punctuation (or removing excess punctuation), decoding or replacing words that are incorrect in several ways, adding missing words (or deleting excess ones), etc. etc. etc.

This is a nice little mystery which will keep you guessing--in parallel with Chief Inspector Alleyn--until almost the end. It includes several references to Marsh's two prior mysteries A Man Lay Dead & Enter a Murderer. There are tons of potential murderers & motives galore--even some Bolsheviks (as in a previous work)--with Alleyn's highly enjoyable repartee with his Boswell, journalist Nigel Bathgate & his fiancée Angela North. While it's a fairly short work, it's satisfying, quite good, but perhaps not Marsh's best--which is very good indeed. This novel has been anthologized in at least two Marsh collections:
The Roderick Alleyn Mysteries: The Nursing Home Murder; Death in a White Tie; Final Curtain &
BOX SET "Four of Her Finest": The Nursing Home Murder / Colour Scheme / Dead Water / Spinsters in Jeopardy.

Best of all, it demonstrates Marsh's almost unequalled style & humorous observations. My favorites are:
p. 11: so maddeningly remote. Their very embraces were masked in a chilly patina of good form. He supposed he had married her in a brief wave of enthusiasm for polar exploration.
p. 112: [Journalist Bathgate]--"Do you read crime fiction?" [Chief Inspector Alleyn]--"I dote on it. It's such a relief to escape from one's work into an entirely different atmosphere."
p. 159: It gave her an uncanny resemblance to something human.

It's also interesting that Marsh quotes Shakespeare: p. 139: "By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes" since Agatha Christie published a mystery entitled By The Pricking Of My Thumbs (Tommy and Tuppence) & Ray Bradbury published Something Wicked This Way Comes.

[page #'s are from the 1963 copyright but probably the same as this one]

FROM A CLASSIC MYSTERY AUTHOR A WONDERFUL BOOK STUFFED WITH THREE GREAT MYSTERIES AND THE DASHING RODERICK ALLEYN