Ngaio Marsh

The crime scene was the stage of the Unicorn Theatre, when a prop gun fired a very real bullet; the victim was an actor clawing his way to stardom using bribery instead of talent; and the suspects included two unwilling girlfriends and several relieved blackmail victims. The stage is set for one...

It was planned as an act of charity: a new piano for the parish hall, an amusing play to finance the gift. The question now under bitter discussion is, who shall play the overture? Though Eleanor Prentice wins, on the night of the performance she cannot play. Miss Campanula steps triumphantly...

The London season has begun. But while debutantes and chaperones plan their luncheons and balls a deadly blackmailer is stalking the highest echelons of society. Naturally, it falls to charming, aloof Detective Inspector Roderick Alleyn - son of Lady Alleyn - to investigate the case. He has...

The April Fool’s Day had been a roaring success for all, it seemed - except for poor Mr. Cartell, who had ended up in the ditch - forever. Then there was the case of Mr. Percival Pyke Period’s letter of condolence, sent before the body was found - not to mention the family squabbles. It was...

Pagan revelry and morris dancing in the middle of a very cold winter set the scene for one of Ngaio Marsh’s most fascinating murder mysteries. When the pesky Anna Bünz arrives at Mardian to investigate the rare survival of folk dancing still practised there, she quickly antagonizes the...

Who in the quiet village of Chipping would kill wealthy spinster Idris Campanula? Plenty of people—among them her fellow cast members from a troubled charity production....

Wealthy Sir Hubert Handesley's original and lively weekend house parties are deservedly famous. To amuse his guests, he has devised a new form of the fashionable Murder Game, in which a guest is secretly selected to commit a 'murder' in the dark, and everyone assembles to solve the crime. But...

It was a horrible death - Maurice Questing was lured into a pool of boiling mud and left there to die. Chief Inspector Roderick Alleyn...

Along with a pack of eccentric guests, Troy enjoys the festivities, until one of the pageant's players mysteriously disappears into the snowy night....

A winter weekend ends in snowbound disaster in a novel which remains a favourite among Marsh readers. It began as an entertainment: eight people, many of them enemies, gathered for a winter weekend by a host with a love for theatre. They would be the characters in a drama that he would devise...

A touring theatre company in New Zealand forms the basis of one of Marsh’s most ambitious and innovative novels. New Zealand theatrical manager Alfred Meyer wanted to celebrate his wife’s birthday in style. The piece de résistance would be the jeroboam of champagne which would descend...

When the President of Ng'ombwana proposes to dispense with the usual security arrangements on an official visit to London Chief Superintendent Alleyn, is called in to try to persuade him otherwise....

When murder upsets the creative tranquility of an artists' colony, Scotland Yard sends in its most famous investigator.....

A classic Ngaio Marsh novel in which a game of darts in an English pub has gruesome consequences. At the Plume of Feathers in south Devon one midsummer evening, eight people are gathered together in the taproom. They are in the habit of playing darts, but on this occasion an experiment takes the...

Rickie Alleyn, son of the famed detective Roderick Alleyn, had taken to the peaceful Channel Island village of Deep Cove to write his book. However, soon enough the tedium of provincial life threatens to send him packing - until, that is, he finds a dead stablehand, and the sleepy community's...

A man dies with his hand on a radio dial....

Young Ricky Alleyn has come to the picturesque fishing village of Deep Cove to write. Though the sleepy little town offers few diversions, Ricky manages to find the most distracting one of all: murder.

Murder, blackmail and drug dealing on the Tiber combine in one of Ngaio Marsh’s liveliest and most evocative novels. When their guide disappears mysteriously in the depths of a Roman basilica, the members of Mr. Sebastian Mailer’s tour group seem strangely unperturbed. But when a body is...

This annual anthology of rare stories of crime and suspense brings together tales from the Golden Age of Detective Fiction for the first time in book form, including a short novel by Christianna Brand. Mystery stories have been around for centuries—there are whodunits, whydunits and howdunits...

It started as a student exercise, the knife under the drape, the model's pose chalked in place. But before Agatha Troy, artist and instructor, returns to the class, the pose has been re-enacted in earnest: the model is dead, fixed for ever in one of the most dramatic poses Troy has ever seen...