#ngaio marsh

[the25centpaperback]

Colour Scheme by Ngaio Marsh, cover by Unknown Artist (1964)

#1960s #unknown artist #ngaio marsh #fontana books #paperback #vintage #book #mystery #skull #skull art

[oldshrewsburyian]

what classic romances do you think measure up to harriet and peter in gaudy night? i’m really craving more satisfying classic romance

Well, kind inquirer, I have a confession. I had read the Wimsey novels multiple times by the age of 16. Over the past 2+ decades, Peter and Harriet have taught me a lot of things, even if I have learned them more slowly and painfully than I would like (Lord, teach us to take our hearts and look them in the face...); even if I feel as though I have not salvaged as much as I could from life's various shipwrecks. The point is: no one measures up, not for me. My dear, if you have let me come as far as your work and your life... That said, I can offer some suggestions, presuming that you mean by "classic romance" romance that happens outside the genre parameters of romance novels. I'll start with the most classic and work my way forwards. [Under the cut for length!]

Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë (for obvious reasons, I imagine. Perhaps the thing I love most in romance is two intense weirdos deciding to love each other intensely and weirdly.)

Much Ado About Nothing, Shakespeare (I know I said I'd work my way forward, but then I said 'intense weirdos' and remembered my beloved Benedick and Beatrice. Beatrice, an unmarried woman in her uncle's household, interrupts men's political conversation to demand to know whether he's alive because she can't stand not knowing for a minute longer... and that's her opening line! and then they roast each other for 2 hours! I love them so much!)

Persuasion, Jane Austen (Anne is, I would argue, quietly intense, while Frederick is obviously so; he's also weird enough for both of them (affectionate.) I adore them, I support them, I wish them many decades of shocking society with how they look at each other across rooms. And dinner tables. And pianos. And dancing squares.)

Artists in Crime/Death in a White Tie, Ngaio Marsh (this is the Alleyn/Troy duology the way that Strong Poison/Have His Carcase/Gaudy Night is the Peter/Harriet trilogy. I adore Troy, an anxious and compassionate artist with gnc tendencies, and Alleyn fascinates me. Intense weirdos again. Alleyn successfully pretends to be normal most of the time, with everyone except about 3 people. Occasionally he decides to stop, or just does because he's very tired and fed up, and then everyone in the room gets very freaked out very quickly. I love him.)

The Case of William Smith, Patricia Wentworth (bonus detective round! Wentworth is not in the Sayers-Marsh class, and this novel has some tropes I don't like, but I love the gentleness of the central romance so much that I still reread it.)

Possession, A.S. Byatt (Victorian poets, the scholars who study them, the life of the mind and the life of the heart. This is absolutely a novel with Gaudy Night in its lineage.)

The French Lieutenant's Woman, John Fowles (I hesitated before adding this to the list, but it's a novel of ideas that is also about love and sex and identity and Englishness with a very vivid setting, so it might fit the bill?)

The English Patient, Michael Ondaatje ('I believe this. When we meet those we fall in love with, there is an aspect of our spirit that is historian, a bit of a pedant, who imagines or remembers a meeting when the other had passed by innocently...')

Charlotte Gray, Sebastian Faulks (Birdsong is the greater novel, but this one might be the one I prefer. I love Charlotte and her quest to find herself that is also a journey toward love! and vocation! and the images for the lovers in this book are indelible)

Bonus round of books I looked at on my shelf and decided were about so many things that the romance might not be central enough: The Children's Book, Love in the Time of Cholera, The Remains of the Day, The Portrait of a Lady, War and Peace, Brideshead Revisited.

Bonus bonus round, not a book: Random Harvest. Yes it is a book, but in the novel, the romance which truly is emotionally anchoring (I would argue) is much more peripheral than it is in the film, which was, like the Wimsey novels, formative for me. Also, look at them:

I have not been normal about the way he looks at her for *checks notes* 25 years. And I hope you find some things to enjoy here!

#long post #book recommendations #romance #two fiddlers both musicians #charlotte brontë #jane austen #sebastian faulks #ngaio marsh #a.s. byatt #john fowles #michael ondaatje #patricia wentworth #random harvest

[e-b-reads]

"Go on," he continued acidly. "Say 'You have the facts, Bathgate. You know my methods Bathgate. What of the little grey cells, Bathgate?' Sling in a quotation; add: 'Oh, my dear chap,' and vanish in a fog of composite fiction."

Overture to Death, Ngaio Marsh

#sometimes i forget how funny nigel bathgate is #overture to death #ngaio marsh #inspector alleyn #currently reading

[yourcoffeeguru]

NGAIO MARSH Thriller Crime Paperback Novel Books 5 x Vintage 1980s Bundle LOT || AUtradingpost - ebay

#ngaio marsh books #novels #paperback #crime books #mystery books #ngaio marsh

[basicallyanotherwitchesthing]

Ngaio Marsh - Spinsters in Jeopardy - Fontana - 1960 (cover illustration by Eileen Walton)

#witches #spinsters #occult #vintage #spinsters in jeopardy #jeopardy #fontana books #ngaio marsh #1960 #eileen walton #black masses #candles

[butchdonne]

hercule poirot or miss marple? why?

OOF THAT'S SO HARD. miss marple tho i think just because unlike poirot she isn't an actual detective she's just constantly finding herself in Situations. also i do enjoy her personality a lot + she's the sort of character it's very fun to come up with backstories for. i do love both of them very much tho <3

however if you like poirot and miss marple can i quickly recommend the inspector alleyn series by ngaio marsh? because that's actually probably my fav mystery series and all the characters are so developed! and inspector alleyn is very charismatic and interesting in particular. it's so underrated for a series that is just as good as agatha christie's novels if not better and ngaio marsh's writing style is gorgeous

#pip squeaks #mystery novels #agatha christie #ngaio marsh

[hentaitiddy666]

When you try to divert suspicion from the fact that you're having an affair with your homie's wife by forcing your homie to dance with you (and also as like, a weird dominance display):

#inspector alleyn #ngaio marsh #a man lay dead

[azazel-dreams]

Tied up in Tinsel by Ngaio Marsh

Rating: ❤️❤️❤️❤❤

#Tied up in Tinsel #Ngaio Marsh #books #book recommendations #murder mystery #book reviews

[theodoradove]

"Dost thou attend me?" "Sir," said Troy, "most heedfully." They exchanged the complacent glance of persons who recognize each other's quotations.

--Spinsters in Jeopardy by Ngaio Marsh

#ngaio marsh #inspector alleyn #agatha troy #the wimsey-lymond spectrum

[everythingsecondhand]

Tied Up In Tinsel, by Ngaio Marsh (Thriller Book Club, 1971).

From a charity shop in Nottingham.

#crime novels #ngaio marsh

[to-the-fishies]

#ngaio marsh #A Surfeit of Lampreys #i just enjoy the phrase Lampreysian Embroideries a GREAT deal #nice to see Nigel for a minute

[oldshrewsburyian]

Hello! Seeing as you are (checks posts) the Designated Wimseyverse Consultant on this website, I wondered if you could answer a quick question for me. I read recently that Ngaio Marsh and Dorothy L. Sayers hated each other (or at least, that Marsh hated Sayers?) but I'm having some trouble googling it, and so far skimming biographies of each of them hasn't brought me any results either. Do you happen to know the scoop?

Hello! Pleased to be a Wimseyverse consultant, would never have the presumption to claim the definite article (but thank you.)

I'm not sure how much of a scoop there is to be had, actually. This may be partially because Marsh systematically burned many of her personal papers. There are some very thinly-veiled digs at/insults of Sayers in Marsh's Overture to Death, where two unpleasant characters are partially based on her. Obliquely, she is described as self-dramatizing and self-deceiving, a "large arrogant spinster" who "adored scandal and... cloaked her passion in a mantle of conscious rectitude." I don't think this is fair. But I do think it is telling.

DLS appears to have cared considerably less about gendered notions of respectability than Marsh. But she may also have suffered less from their enforcement. I think it's noteworthy that while Marsh was surrounded by rumors of queerness (and what historian Judith Bennett might call lesbian-like relationships), she's also much less compassionate to queer/gnc women than Sayers is in her novels. I think it's also worth noting that Marsh appears to have had less ambivalent attitudes than Sayers towards the police, but also vigorously and categorically disapproved of the death penalty.

I'm not sure how Sayers and Marsh's different attitudes towards genre may also have contributed towards this. Sayers was, like me, a Sherlockian, and a cheerful meta-commenter on crime novel tropes. When Marsh comments on other authors/detectives in the pages of the Alleyn novels, it's to mock them. I don't know enough about their attitudes as expressed elsewhere to comment more on this, but I think it's another interesting fact. The speculation that Marsh may have resented Sayers' more successful transcending of genre remains just that.

So, in short: I don't have a scoop. I only have very tenuous theories. As far as I've read/found, the antipathy does appear to have been one-sided. Others may well know more!

#dorothy l. sayers #ngaio marsh #my detection obsession #queens of crime

[e-b-reads]

Books of the Month: Sep 2024

Whoops, should probably do this before it gets any closer to Halloween. Interestingly, and unusually, my reading seems to have slowed down a little in terms of sheer number of books after the summer, but I think this is partly because 1) the fall has still been pretty busy (still plenty of work, though less than during summer camp season, with added school stuff) and 2) I've had the mental energy to read some different, longer books instead of lots of mindless, quick murder mysteries. (Still plenty of mysteries, though). Here's the books from September that I think are worth reading:

The Curse of Chalion (Lois McMaster Bujold): Had an odd experience reading this book: I didn't exactly know what was going to happen, but after I hit some fairly major plot points, I would think, "Oh yeah, that's right," as if I'd been expecting them. (There's some neat twists in this book! I was not expecting them all!) Anyway, I do read a lot and sometimes forget what I've read, so it's possible I read this a while in the past (sometime before I started tracking my reads, 3 years ago) and then forgot most of it. I don't plan to forget it this time, because I really enjoyed the experience! Good writing, and I do like a main character who's already seen a lot of shit and would ideally like to just live a quiet life (but also sighs and takes responsibility for things pretty regularly). Sad to see that the sequel is not also focused on Caz. (I'll read it someday anyway, because again, good writing!) (I'm not sure the etiquette on this, but to give credit where due: I had a few reasons to check this book out of the library, but one was that I've seen @wearethekat rec it convincingly multiple times!)

Broken Ice (Matt Goldman): OK, so this is actually book 2 in the Nils Shapiro mystery series (I read book 1 in August), so I recommend starting with book 1, but I'm more recommending the series than any individual book. Each mystery is interesting and original, but none of them stands out to me in particular; what I like is that the main character could very easily be a loner, sad, possibly alcoholic, slightly sexist private detective, but instead he builds up some healthy relationships over the series (romantic and other), and generally is someone I think I would get along with. There are 4 books so far, I wouldn't be surprised if there's a book 5 someday but I see nothing online promoting one.

Overture to Death (Ngaio Marsh): I don't think I've recommended this Inspector Alleyn mystery before, anyway? I think it's one of her better-crafted ones (they're all pretty good tho, imo), with some fascinating characters. (Though I feel I should mention, I reread it this time because of @oldshrewsburyian mentioning that 2 of the spinster-ish characters were at least somewhat - unflatteringly - based on Dorothy Sayers and wow, they're even worse than I remembered!)

#book recs #books of the month #the curse of chalion #lois mcmaster bujold #broken ice #matt goldman #overture to death #ngaio marsh #inspector alleyn

[my-52-weeks-with-christie]

View On WordPress

#book #book cover #book photo #book pic #death in a white tie #mystery #Ngaio marsh #vintage book

[basicallyanotherwitchesthing]

Ngaio Marsh - Spinsters In Jeopardy - Fontana - 1973

#witches #spinsters #occult #vintage #spinsters in jeopardy #fontana books #ngaio marsh #1973 #jeopardy #daggers #incense burners

[superb-fairywren]

I like thinking about the scene in Artists in Crime when Alleyn is taking the local through clues, and all of a sudden the local also has a tape measure??? So my thoughts are either A. the local had a tape on him so props to him he'll go far or B. Fox recognises keen men at 50 yards and keeps extra measures on his person to gift at times of need

#inspector alleyn mysteries #inspector alleyn #roderick alleyn #detective-sergeant fox #ngaio marsh #queens of crime #murder mystery #high sarah thoughts #yeaaah forgot to mention that - but this is still valid and im chilling