Customer Reviews

Overture To Death

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

 

 

For Ngaio Marsh fans, this book is a must. The usual deft and scathing descriptions of small-town characters had me rolling on the floor. I can never play the Rachmaninoff opening bars again without collapsing in laughter. Tight plot, smoothly balanced progression to a classic Marsh finish. The book includes a sweet romantic sub-plot, handled nicely. Beware, if you are particularly sensitive about remarks that make fun of spinsters, you may not find this book as funny as I did.

Death by a Rachmaninov Prelude is surely one of Marsh's most inspired murder methods. In addition, we have a great village setting, a good mystery plot and Marsh's typical wit. For Christie fans unfamiliar with Marsh, this one is a great introduction.

Overture to Death is Marsh's best for a few reasons: 1) The background of the murder (English village life) is extremely well drawn. 2) The characters are so well-defined, you feel as if you know them. 3) The method of murder is the cleverest I've seen yet, from Dame Marsh, and is completely plausible. One of the reasons that people look down on mystery novels, is that often they are about plot with scant attention paid to the literary aspects. Not so with Ngaio Marsh.

I'm uncertain exactly where to locate a review of the unabridged audio version of the book but this seems about as good a place as any. The reading is by a noted British actress and personality who uses a variety of different names for her readings. Nadia May it is for this one.
Dame Ngaio is particularly well served by a reading-acting out of her text since the structure of many of her books reflects the staging of a play. In Overture, the first major section, setting up the characters and the crime, particularly reflects this approach, being dramatically sound, involving us deeply in the cast of players and the strong cross-currents which their love, jealousy, hate, irritation, fears, and other emotional responses engender, as they lead, almost inevitably, to the ultimate murder.
Over-all, I would rank this book among the better ones in the Inspector Alleyn series, as she passes before our senses the classic types, the young lovers, the strikingly handsome but weak,though good-spirited minister, the aging head of an aristocratic family fallen on hard times, the spinster who comes to live in his home with the passing of her sister, his wife, and the wealthy spinster do-gooder who is officious and overbearing to a fault. There are fine characterizations, some excellent exemplary scenes, an interesting murder, and the usual team of Alleyn and Fox (which has become so familiar due to the TV production). Her portrait of the English Village gives one a sense of reality ( of what was) although I have no idea how well it reflects the actuality of her times. The puzzle is a good one, the killer a suitable one, whose very definition implies his or her guilt.
The reader does an excellent job in giving each a voice appropriate to the role played, interest is maintained throughout. I can recommend the audio book (in unabridged form, the only one I have heard) to any follower of Marsh and to most detective story fans who are open to the classic mystery form.

Ms. Marsh is definitely one of the top writers of the classic English puzzle mystery, and this book bears that out. I thought that I had read all Ngaio Marsh books years ago, and I was going to reread some of them, but when I looked I found that there were actually a few that I missed. This book was one of those. I couldn't believe how quickly I fell back into Roderick Alleyn and his sidekick Brer Fox. It was like meeting old friends. Alleyn is unique in the detective genre. He's very much a gentleman, but smart as a whip. Ms. Marsh also does the English village mystery in style. Her characters are realistic and believable, and it feels like you can picture them as you read. In this book one of the two main spinsters in the village is murdered, and when Alleyn investigates he finds there are numerous people with motives, but do they have the right victim? Was the wrong person killed? You have to read to find out.

Those familiar with Ngaio Marsh and her Roderick Alleyn novels know that her writing style isn't the frenzied roller-coaster ride so popular today. She takes her time letting you know her characters and slyly sending up the upper classes of her day. However, in "Overture to Death," four or five chapters slip by simply exploring the petty machinations of two village harpies: a pair of gossipy, spiteful, meddlesome spinsters without equal. The endless focus of these parodies of the malicious spinster droned on so long that I nodded off several time. While sometimes humorous, a lot less of Eleanor Prentice and Idris Campanula would have gone a long way in helping speed the pace a bit.

Once past the lengthy exposition and when the overbearing Miss Campanula gets what's coming to her and Alleyn comes on the scene, however, the novel picks up quite a bit. I recommend the book to Marsh fans like myself; however, those who make "Overture to Death" their first taste of Marsh are unlikely to be back for seconds. Newcomers are better off starting with "Man Lay Dead (The Ngaio Marsh Collection)," "Artists in Crime (Dead Letter Mysteries)," or "Death in a White Tie."

I have read about a dozen Marsh mysteries and found this to be among her best, for several reasons. The characters are distinct, some almost Dickensian in quality. The mystery is clever and very nicely revealed. And as always, Alleyn lets us in for a bit of philosophy along with his detection. It seems at this point in her career, Marsh was at the top of her game.

An example of Marsh at her best (although not in the top 5, hence the 4 star rating) it contains every element that's wonderful about the Inspector Alleyn series.

Originally published in 1939, OTD is set in a town run roughshod over by a pair of bloody-minded spinsters. When one of them is killed in a particularly fitting way, it's all to easy to find someone who'd be willing to kill both. Alleyn has to sort the prejudice from the truth to catch a killer in this remarkable classic mystery.

Scotland Yard's Inspector Rodrick Alleyn is called in to investigate the clever murder of Idris Campanula. Miss Campanula was a forthright spinster who believed in saying just what she thought without regard for the consequences.
She and her dear friend Eleanor Prentice have managed to keep a firm hand on the lives and activities of their contemporaries by force of their individual personalities, but now Idris is dead by a hidden pistol fired from within a piano that may have been meant for Eleanor who was scheduled to play for the opening of a fund raising performance.
The delightful cast of characters of a standard manor house English mystery, with the squire, the young lovers, and an illicit love affair makes for grand reading in the cozy style.
Nash Black, author of SINS OF THE FATHERS.

In many ways, "Overture to Death" is a typical early Marsh mystery. Alleyn, with the help of his assistant, Inspector Fox, and his Watson, Nigel Bathgate, is called in by an overbusy local police authority to investigate a murder among a group of people who are more stereotypical than realistic. But this is where "Overture" departs from most Marsh mysteries, for it was written mainly to cruelly and unfairly attack the writer Dorothy L. Sayers, whom Marsh loathed.

The most prominent characters in this novel are two middle-aged spinsters: Miss Idris Campanula, a wealthy orphan, and Miss Eleanor Prentice, a cousin of the local squire. But neither is a realistic, three-dimensional character: they're both stupid, hysterical, pathetic, pitiful, worthless, dried-up old religion-mad harpies with both a Freudian hatred of sex and a secret unrequited passion for the local rector. They shriek, they howl, they stage scenes, they passive-aggressively meddle, they make life a living hell for everyone around them, and it's all so wildly unrealistic. It made my eyes glaze over and, worse, made it far too easy to figure out whodunit.

So what does this have to do with Sayers? Marsh, who deeply distrusted anyone with a strong religious bent and who may have been personally offended by the events in Sayers's Unnatural Death, believed that Sayers was a pathetic old biddy who had created Lord Peter so she could fall vicariously in love with a man who wouldn't pester her with tiresome demands for sex. This is of course a load of hooey: Sayers was as sexually adventurous as any woman of the time, as her recently published letters show, but she was very touchy about the fact that she had secretly borne a child out of wedlock and therefore kept her personal life under lock and key. (And rightly so, since had the fact been known to the general public both her careers - lay theologian and popular writer - would have been destroyed.) Careful readers of this book will notice that Henry, the son of the squire, is said to look more like Miss Prentice (his father's cousin) than he does his own father. One suspects that Marsh had got ahold of Sayers's secret and was originally intending to build the murder around Henry being Miss Prentice's illegitimate child which, given the misunderstanding of Freud that permeates the book, would have "explained" Miss Prentice's passive-aggressive, repressed hysteria. As is, she took the book in a different direction, leaving the clues in place possibly to twig Ms. Sayers. (Incidentally, both spinsters' surnames are meant to give away the game. Miss Campanula's surname means "bell ringer" and refers to Sayers's The Nine Tailors; Miss Prentice of the Hall refers to Prentice-Hall, Ms. Sayers's publishers.)

The other characters are tolerable but all still fit into standard stereotypes: the modern young couple portrayed as wholesome and clean-cut despite seemingly smoking ten packs of cigarettes a day each, the robust county squire, the morally steadfast but emotionally weak rector, the romantically deluded doctor and the woman who's pulling the wool over his eyes, etc. This is all standard Marsh and doesn't detract from the mystery. Idris and Eleanor, on the other hand, are so stupidly offensive that they ruin the book.

I don't recommend this book.