For example: recently on YouTube I saw an excerpt from Thrill Me, the Leopold and Loeb musical – yes, somebody thought to write a musical about Leopold and Loeb – and I heard a musical phrase that I must have heard for the first time. And yet my immediate response was that I’d heard it in every American musical written in the twenty-first century. If I knew about music I could explain and justify this scathing opinion, of which experience makes me extremely confident.

Country music I like as a genre because it has narrative form.

Q: what happens when you play a country record backwards?

A: the man stops drinking, the woman stops crying and the dog comes back to life.

I’m not an avid country music fan, although every so often I have country fits and submerge myself in Glen Campbell, Townes van Zandt or the Western Writers of America Top 100 (yes, I know that’s not strictly speaking Country Music but it does include some absolute belters). Recently I’ve been looping Emmylou Harris’ version of Anna McGarrigle’s ‘Going Back to Harlan,’ for reasons I cannot fathom beyond its utter genius. Not, admittedly, a song that ticks the box for simplicity.

It would be lovely if I had the expertise to write about it and do justice to the music, but alas! I can’t, so there it is. That needn’t stop me appreciating the work of lyricists and performers, chief amongst whom is the late and greatly lamented Dolly Parton.

In the list I have of Top 100 Songs of the 20^th Century, provenance unknown, ‘I Will Always Love You’ sits snugly at #38. It is a great song; like the best country (and pop) music, it has the genius of simplicity. Sondheim could never have written country music and probably wouldn’t have wanted to.

“If I should stay
I would only be in your way
So I’ll go, but I know
I’ll think of you every step of the way”

As a wordsmith I particularly like should, a word that needs more airtime. It’s also a song that could be acted, rather than belted out of all subtlety as in the Whitney Houston version.

When I was a child, my parents had a few country tapes that were played on long car journeys. It was here we learned of Billie Jo Spears, Donna Fargo and Dolly. Even as a child, when I thought and spake as a child, I knew that the songs were simple and straightforward yet somehow different from the simplicity of pop, which I imbibed largely from my siblings’ mixtapes. Pop was rarely played in the car because my parents only knew one pop group and that was ABBA.

(The question of ABBA is for another time, although they did seem to have pioneered Google Translate years before it was invented).

Dolly was a great songwriter with a distinctive, demotic touch. Nothing about her work is too clever or too complicated; nor is it generic and disposable. It carries her own particular style.

The narrative ‘Coat of Many Colors’ touches everyone’s heart because it’s the Platonic ideal of the mother. ‘Jolene’ raises so many interesting questions about the three people involved. ‘Tennessee Mountain Home’ and ‘Tennessee Homesick Blues’ are top-notch examples of the sub-genre of Heimatlieder, a word I may just have invented.

Rolling Stone produced its own list of the Top 50 Dolly songs. ‘Little Sparrow’ it calls “yet another of Parton’s finest feminist anthems. The harmony-laced a cappella intro [on the album] is utterly chilling.”

Dolly was okay in the film version of Carol Hall’s Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, an excellent score into which was shoehorned ‘I Will Always Love You.’ I realised only with her death that I needed to listen to 9 to 5 – not the song, which everybody knows, but her musical-theatre adaptation of the 1980 film for which she wrote the theme song.

Quite apart from the driving rhythm, the original song has memorable lyrics with classic country touches:

“Well, I tumble outta bed and stumble to the kitchen
Pour myself a cup of ambition
Yawn and stretch and try to come to life”

Half-rhymes, which always annoy me in musical theatre, often have a demotic charm in country music. Kitchen / ambition, credit / let it, shatter / ladder… and then it explodes into the chorus that millions have yelled over the decades:

“Workin’ 9 to 5, what a way to make a livin’”

‘9 to 5’ was Dolly’s first Oscar nomination for Original Song. It lost to ‘Fame’; a justifiable decision, especially for those of us who like to block Manhattan streets by dancing on cars.

Her second loss, however, still nudges my blood pressure a little too high. ‘Travelin’ Thru,’ a beautiful song, lost to ‘It’s Hard Out Here For A Pimp,’ a decision at which future generations will scratch their heads and wonder what the voters were thinking.

“God made me for a reason and nothin’ is in vain
Redemption comes in many shapes with many kinds of pain
Oh, sweet Jesus, if you’re listenin’, keep me ever close to you
As I’m stumblin’, tumblin’, wanderin’, as I’m travelin’ through”

That’s not merely high-class backwoods spirituality, it’s theology as good as most Victorian hymns and with better music. And it lost to:

“You know it hard out here for a pimp (yeah know)
When he tryin’ to get this money for the rent (yeah know)
For the Cadillac and gas money spent (yeah know)
Will have a whole lot of bitches talking shit (yeah know)”

No technical knowledge of music required to know that the Academy got this badly wrong.

For all its narrative qualities and excellent songwriters, country music has never really produced a great musical. The best is probably Big River, the story of Huck Finn with a fine score by the genius of Roger Miller, although Bright Star, Floyd Collins and The Spitfire Grill are country-flecked and well worth your time.

Although Dolly wrote the score, 9 to 5 (Broadway 2008) isn’t really a country musical. It’s not impossible to write a country score for a non-country setting, but it would be a very bold creative decision. Being an urban comedy, 9 to 5 might be expected to sound more like Burt Bacharach’s Promises, Promises. Surprisingly, it sounds more like Cy Coleman’s City of Angels. Or perhaps that isn’t too surprising, urban pop having given way to urban grit since 1968. There are growls and snarls and heavy beats alongside upbeat numbers and songs that sound more like Dolly.

9 to 5 has to go down as a flop, running only 148 performances. That makes it one of Dolly’s few failures, although nobody blamed her and she was Tony-nominated for the score. The New York Post was positive, opining that “her countrified pop, enhanced by fiddle and pedal-steel guitar, fits perfectly on Broadway. Of all the mainstream artists who’ve tried their hand at show music in the past few years, she may be the most convincing.” Better than Elton John or Sting (Billy Elliott or The Last Ship)? Put like that, 9 to 5 sounds even better. The score is varied and entertaining and, if not exactly hummable, attracts the ear rather than melting into the wallpaper.

Country characteristics such as inverted syntax and awkward scansion are in evidence, along with the half-rhymes that, in the context of a musical theatre song, don’t have the same vernacular charm of proper country:

“Women just use us, they trick us and confuse us,
Like Adam, and Samson, and John! Poor John!
His head on a platter, no choice in the matter.
Now I’m not Baptist, but I have been conned!”

Aiii. That’s a neat idea let down by a terrible last line. There are too many loud ensemble numbers for my liking – horrible Legally Blonde flashbacks – but there are a few gems, such as ‘Backwoods Barbie’ for Doralee (the Dolly character). The most memorable number, other than the title song, is the FU ballad, ‘Get Out and Stay Out’:

“So get out and stay out, I’ve finally had enough
Don’t kiss me on your way out, it wouldn’t move me much
You used me, abused me, you cheated and you lied
So get out and stay out, I’m taking back my life”

In this instance, the half-rhyme / assonance works because the force of the lines lies in their first half. The first half of the line is a slap, the second half a glare. Whether that’s art or craft, it elevates the song into a staple of concerts and showcases for years to come.

But it’s the first-half closer, ‘Shine Like the Sun,’ that best encapsulates the Dolly Parton country philosophy:

“When the crying’s all done, when the lying’s all done,
When the trying’s all done there’ll be nothing but sun, when it’s all said and done
We’re gonna shine

Shine
Shine
Shine like the sun
Shine
Shine
Like the sun”

God Bless you, Dolly. And thank you.

For the information of people of a certain age and sedentary lifestyle, Angela Lansbury’s third stardom was Murder, She Wrote. Robert Preston wasn’t a star before The Music Man, he was a reliable film actor who didn’t sing. John Lithgow was a B+ screen legend before Sweet Smell of Success and then, more profitably, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels; Tyne Daly attended AMDA when it was two rooms on the Upper West Side, so it wasn’t too much of a surprise when the Cagney and Lacey star scored in the Gypsy revival.

“Then there are those,” note Bloom & Vlastnik, “who couldn’t sing a lick in the traditional way but managed, through star power and determination, to make audiences think they were every bit as adept as Barbara Cook.” That could easily be applied to Judi Dench, who (to adapt from A Chorus Line) would have been ‘Acting Ten, Singing Three’ yet was Sally Bowles in Cabaret; a spellbinding Desiree in A Little Night Music; and would have been in Cats had she not fallen from the stage. (Lucky her, you might think).

B&V namecheck stars who proved their worth: Diana Rigg, who was intended for Broadway in Colette and played Phyllis in the London premiere of Follies; Sid Caesar, the tv comedian and host who carried Little Me; and the indomitable Katharine Hepburn, one of those women for whom the word ‘indomitable’ was invented.

(More people should be called ‘domitable’).

Hepburn famously hit the Broadway musical in Coco (1969), one of the post-Fair Lady shows in which nobody had the power to whisper in the ear of Alan Jay Lerner when he was being a bit silly. The critics were dismissive of the most expensive show thitherto, but Hepburn’s ability to do almost anything included hypnotising the audience into believing she could sing.

Yes, but was Coco any good?

It had nice costumes…

That’s a bit mean. It is, as the kids say, ‘worth a listen.’ Andre Previn’s music has its moments and Lerner’s lyrics are always interesting. Nonetheless, as I’ve said before, nobody – and especially nobody as talented as Lerner – should have saddled Kate the Great with lines like “up goes the income / and out go the nincom- / poops I had to please before.”

I really like the first half of ‘Gabrielle,’ which takes us back to Coco’s childhood when she lived “in a cold grey house with two cold grey aunts” and only occasionally saw her father. Onstage, the adult Hepburn (singing her own younger self) conducted a dialogue with her father, seen on video, after which she tells us that “I never saw him again.” All very peculiar, but it sounds great.

One minor complaint: when he sings “Gabrielle / there’s a new and happy you not far away”, Lerner should have known that it’s very easy to hear ‘and happy’ as ‘unhappy.’

Coco was given an interminable sequence at the Tony Awards, of which this is but a snippet.

Roz Russell was a three-time Oscar nominee before she tackled the Broadway musical in Wonderful Town, although she wasn’t nominated for one of the greatest performances of all time in His Girl Friday. (The Front Page, of which Friday was an adaptation, was adapted with little effect into a musical called Windy City). She was paid a small fortune for Wonderful Town, something of a risk for a star unproven in musicals. Russell was never entirely secure: her co-star Edith Adams had to hum for her the opening note of ‘Ohio.’

Although my knowledge of actresses under the age of 30 suggests that this will strike them as assault, Russell brought the house down for months on end with this number:

Lauren Bacall couldn’t really sing either. Still, she was in eight numbers of Applause (1970), a vocal burden akin to Higgins’ in Fair Lady and neither something that can be chatted through. Applause was an adaptation of All About Eve, a great film. Ought great films to be adapted? Almost nothing is of necessity excluded from adaptation if you don’t mind the challenge. My Fair Lady was an adaptation of an extremely good play, so it can be done. Applause isn’t a patch on All About Eve, but a B-grade adaptation of an A+ original is probably better than a C+ adaptation of a B-grade original (Ghost).

This may have been the gayest thing to hit Broadway to that point, including Cole Porter and The Boys in the Band, although I bet it was gayer onstage.

Bacall beat Hepburn to the Tony and Applause beat Coco in a season so poor that most of the categories had only three nominees. (The other contender for Best Musical was Purlie, which was at least a hit). Another eligible musical was the flop Minnie’s Boys, with film star Shelley Winters as the Marx Brothers’ mother. Nobody really hated it, but it was 76 performances and out for Winters (and no Tony nomination - competing, if that’s the word, with Bacall and Hepburn was Dilys Watling in Georgy, the flop adaptation of Georgy Girl).

Bacall won another Tony for playing the Hepburn character in Woman of the Year, nominated in a season even worse than 1969-70. The other nominations were two revues and 42nd Street.

Rex Harrison in My Fair Lady is the ultimate ‘hey-I-can-do-it’ star, closely followed by Richard Burton in Camelot. The fine actor Robert Shaw attempted to join the club with Gantry (1970).

With what? You ask.

With Gantry, music by Stanley Lebowsky and lyrics by Fred Tobias!

By whom?

Yes well, Gantry opened and closed on the same night (Valentine’s Day 1970), a feat achieved by very few. When the audience arrived, noted Ken Mandelbaum, “it was greeted with a show curtain painted to resemble the side of a worn revival tent. It bore the inscription ‘Where Will YOU Spend Eternity?’ – the answer turned out to be, at Gantry.”

(Which reminds me of the old line ‘if Hitler’s still alive, I hope he’s out of town with a musical’).

Robert Shaw gave two of the best film performances of the 1960s, in From Russia With Love and A Man For All Seasons, but playing Elmer Gantry in a musical was a step too far. “His was another of those ‘Yes, I can’t’ singing voices,” groused Mordden, “with a gruesome vibrato.” Not that he had much chance: when the songs “weren’t almost okay, they were terrible.”

Poor Rita Moreno. Shaw seems to be trying to out-psych the material.

What was it about the 1969-70 season? Fortunately Company was waiting in the wings.

B&V also namecheck stars who proved… that they might have been poorly advised.

“As always blaming everyone but himself” for the failure of The Girl Who Came to Supper (1961), Noel Coward regretted Jose Ferrer in the lead. A bigger problem might have been that it looked a bit like a Fair Lady retread and Ferrer, therefore, compared poorly to Rex Harrison. Nobody really blamed Vincent Price for the failure of Darling of the Day (1968), although both Ferrer and Price played second fiddle to leading ladies Florence Henderson and Patricia Routledge. That was it for Price, but Ferrer replaced Richard Kiley for the national tour of Man of La Mancha. This is difficult to credit as Ferrer doesn’t have anything like Kiley’s voice.

Bette Davis starred in one of the most notorious flops ever to close before Broadway, Miss Moffat (strike one for Katharine Hepburn!) Here is possibly the only recording, which gives every indication that Broadway dodged a bullet.

Closer to making it work was tv star Lucille Ball, who hit Broadway with Wildcat in 1960. Although her character, perhaps inevitably, increasingly morphed into her Lucy character from tv, Ball shouldered not only the role but also the cost of the show. Eventually she collapsed onstage; the show closed ‘temporarily’ and never reopened.

“The evening never quite came together, and it was nobody’s fault but Ball’s.” Thus Mordden, never inclined to pull his punches. “Wildcat’s worst problem was Ball’s lack of formal savvy. She couldn’t sing - really couldn’t sing… nor, truly, was this the right kind of musical for a clown.” No, Ethan, tell us what you really think?

This was, by common consent, the best two minutes in the show. I don’t think Ball’s voice is that bad…

“It was obvious that the show was not worthy of its star,” comments Ken Mandelbaum, more polite than Mordden; either way, Ball never returned to Broadway. She did, however, play the title role in the movie version of Mame, which made everybody very appreciative of Angela Lansbury.

Which brings us, so to speak, back to doh. It seems therefore fitting to end with Lansbury’s final appearance in a Broadway musical, here performed to celebrate its composer’s birthday:

‘Death on the Air’ begins at 7.30 on Christmas morning, when Emily the maid finds Septimus Tonks dead, slumped against his wireless. Burns on his hand suggest electrocution. Dr Meadows, who calls Alleyn, tells him that Septimus bullied his wife and children.

Alleyn finds two very small holes drilled in the set and unexpected traces of blotting paper. Someone substituted the metal ends of curtain rods for the Bakelite knobs. Gary and Arthur, sons, insist they were out of the house after 10. Philipa and Hislop, daughter and secretary, kissed and thereby provoked a furious row with Septimus. The electric radiator in her room went out for ten minutes after a loud ‘crash of static’. The butler recalls that Septimus always licked his fingers before touching a thing, which greatly annoyed Hislop. Septimus had a hold over Hislop, who once took some money and replaced it; Hislop is on record as feeling the desire to murder Septimus.

Alleyn suggests to Dr Meadows that he will arrest Hislop, which prompts Meadows to go home and write a confession. He loved Mrs Tonks, stole Philipa’s key and snuck in on Christmas Eve to set up the wireless trap and clean up afterwards.

The Reader has no idea how this would work in practice, but it’s undoubtedly clever.

‘I Can Find My Way Out’ is the murder referred to in Opening Night.

It is the opening night (funnily enough) of Tony Gill’s play. It stars Coralie Browne, estranged from her Russian playwright husband; her lover Canning Cumberland, who steals scenes when drunk and annoys the author; Barry George, the actor from whom scenes are stolen; and HJ Bannington, shoved into a dressing-room without a fire.

Lord Michael Lamprey, having drinks with the Alleyns, is contrived by the author to deliver a suitcase to Gill at the Jupiter Theatre. The suitcase falls open to reveal a disguise, which Mike cheerfully dons. Using a card he finds in Alleyn’s overcoat, he gains entrance backstage. Coralie faints when she sees him. At play’s end, Mike smells gas and drags Canning from his gas-filled dressing room.

Alleyn looks round the dressing rooms and concludes it wasn’t suicide. Barry arranged Tony’s costume, for the Chelsea Arts Ball, to resemble Coralie’s husband. No wonder she fainted. Alleyn does some nifty detection with the gas fires in adjoining dressing rooms, which may be understood by anyone over the age of 70. A smear of greasepaint and fake ginger hair carelessly left on a tube prove that Bannington did it. Canning intended to prosecute him for forging a cheque.

The Reader can’t help thinking he was a very careless murderer.

‘Chapter and Verse’ finds Troy, at the Alleyn’s country home in Little Copplestone, visited by Mr Bates, a bookman and friend of Alleyn. He has a Bible with deaths marked by suspicious scriptural texts. They are particularly suspicious as nobody with those names has ever died in the village. It all becomes even more suspicious when Mr Bates falls from the tower during Harvest Festival.

Everything seems to point to 1921, when a local heiress left for New Zealand. A slip on the relevant sizes of New Zealand and British whitebait prove to Alleyn that the postmistress is the heiress, who returned incognito some years ago having, in 1921, killed her uncle and the beloved of the man she loved, who then threw himself from the tower.

‘The Hand in the Sand’ is an apparently true story of an attempted insurance fraud in New Zealand in 1886, ruined by the fraudster who advertised his own death and yet adopted a quite ridiculous disguise.

‘The Cupid Mirror’ is a tale told by Lord John to his dinner companion as he sits at the table opposite the eponymous mirror, as he once did many years before and saw a dreadful old woman fall asleep; she died later that evening. The culprit is still an excellent wine-waiter.

‘A Fool About Money’ is an entertaining little story about two women, strangers on a train, who each think the other has stolen her £10.

‘Morepork’ is set deep in the Southern Alps, where Caley Bridgeman intends to record the call of the morepork (ruru), a small brown owl. Also along are his wife, his stepson, Solomon Gosse and David Wingfield, taxidermist, who has illegally killed a rifleman (titipounamu), a very small wren. Heavy rain fills the river… and brings Caley’s drowned corpse.

Four deerstalkers helpfully arrive and retrieve the corpse. They find that Caley’s footbridge had been shifted, (probably) causing him to fall into the river. The two groups collectively hold a ‘council of inquiry,’ in which Curtis-Vane (lawyer) acts as ‘ersatz coroner.’ There is general agreement that Caley was seen alive the previous morning. Curtis-Vane has a bright idea: if Caley recorded the morepork, he was definitely alive the previous evening. He did indeed record the morepork… and, unbeknownst, the voices of his wife and Solomon conspiring his murder.

The volume also includes ‘Evil Liver,’ a telescript Marsh wrote for a 1970s British tv series, in which members of the audience acted as the jury. It’s quite entertaining. Joan Hickson played the defendant.

These stories were worth publishing and The Collected Short Fiction is a satisfying coda to Marsh’s long and distinguished career.

Problem at Pollensa Bay (1991) is a collection of neglected Agatha Christie that someone had inexplicably failed to publish in book form.

The title story was published in 1936 as a Poirot mystery. Here it is repurposed for Parker Pyne, which actually makes sense.

Mr Parker Pyne finds a small hotel in Majorca, overlooking Pollensa Bay. A mutual acquaintance ‘outs’ him to Mrs Chester, whose problem is Betty, the fiancée of her beloved son Basil. Her dislike of Betty is superseded by the appearance of Dolores, who sweeps Basil off her feet and makes Mrs Chester into an ally of Betty. Dolores is of course Madeleine aka Maggie, employee of Mr Parker Pyne, and he ‘arranges’ her departure from Majorca so a happy ending will ensue.

‘The Second Gong’ is for dinner at Lytcham Close. The demanding host, Hubert Lytcham Roche, is not there for dinner. Poirot is, having arrived by train at Roche’s invitation. The study door is locked; when it’s broken, Roche is found at his desk, having apparently shot himself. Poirot announces that Roche suspected he was being swindled but didn’t want the police ‘for family reasons.’ Poirot finds two sets of high-heeled footprints in the flowerbed and does his trick of closing French windows from the outside. There ought to have been more footprints, which proves that somebody shot Roche, left the room and smoothed the flowerbed. This turns out to be the secretary, whose fatal gunshot passed through Roche’s head and struck the dinner gong.

This would become ‘Dead Man’s Mirror’ in Murder in the Mews.

‘Yellow Iris’ begins with a melodramatic ‘life or death’ phone call to Poirot at 11.30pm, summoning him to the Jardin des Cygnes. There he finds his young friend Tony Chapell at a table set with yellow irises. Barton Russell is giving the party in memory of Iris, his late wife, who committed suicide – possibly – in similar circumstances. Lights go down for the cabaret and, when they return, Iris’ sister Pauline is face down on the table. Cyanide potassium is found in Carter’s breast pocket. Pauline is not in fact dead; Russell impersonated a waiter during the cabaret and added cyanide to her glass whilst refilling with champagne, but Poirot was one step ahead. The call came from Pauline, who thought ‘a foreigner’ would respond to melodrama.

This would be expanded into the novel Sparkling Cyanide.

‘The Harlequin Tea Set’ sees the welcome return of Mr Satterthwaite, whose car trouble in Kingsbourne Ducis leads him to The Harlequin Café. To nobody’s surprise, Mr Quin enters shortly afterwards, along with Hermes his dog. Mr Satterthwaite is off to see his old friend Tom Addison and his family. Beryl Gilliatt, Tom’s daughter-in-law, comes in to buy some replacement teacups from the Harlequin set. Mr Quin offers one word to Mr Satterthwaite: ‘Daltonism.’

At Tom’s house are Simon, his son-in-law, and three grandchildren Roland, Timothy and Inez (although one of the boys is actually Beryl’s son from her first marriage). The scarecrow resembles Mr Quin. Beryl breaks Timothy’s red cup and replaces it with a blue cup, from which Mr Satterthwaite stops him drinking. Beryl was trying to poison him so that her son could inherit; Timothy inherited the family colour-blindness.

Although The Reader thinks it would have been incredibly complicated for Beryl to explain, it is a delight to meet Mr Quin again.

‘The Regatta Mystery’ was also a Poirot story repurposed for Mr Parker Pyne.

Eve the precocious 15yo successfully purloins Isaac Pointz’ diamond at the dinner table. When she goes to return it, it seems to have fallen from the bag clasp where she stuck it. Llewellyn, who opened a window during the search, comes in despair to Parker Pyne. He knows that the Amalfi Gang stole the diamond: Eve (really 27yo) palmed the diamond, stuck it to the underside of a plate that was removed by a waiter, admired the paste replica she brought and destroyed it during the search. Parker Pyne was suspicious of anyone who had plasticine to hand.

‘The Love Detectives’ finds Mr Satterthwaite taken by Colonel Melrose to the scene of Sir James Dwighton’s murder. Sir James was hit with a bronze figure. Young Lady Dwighton is suspected, due in part to her association with Paul Delangua. En route, their car collides with that of – to nobody’s surprise – Mr Quin, who comes along to the Dwightons. “He was struck down by Venus.”

The overturned clock stopped at 6.30pm. “Clocks don’t fall like that,” notes Mr Quin, i.e. on their side. Mr Satterthwaite picks a sliver of glass from the fireplace. Jennings the valet left Sir James at 6.20. Laura Dwighton confesses to shooting him, then Paul confesses to stabbing him. She says that Sir James had, earlier that day, dismissed Jennings for pilfering. The golf watch in Sir James’ pocket had been smashed, presumably by his fall, and stopped at 6.15.

Mr Satterthwaite observes that the butler, who discovered the body, expected the windows to be open. In fact, Paul closed them when he entered the room to kill Sir James. The sliver of glass proves the watch was smashed outside his pocket. Laura and Paul ‘got the idea from a novel,’ presumably Murder at the Vicarage.

‘Next to a Dog’ concerns out-of-work Joyce, who won’t leave her beloved dog Terry. She is forced to accept Arthur Halliday’s proposal, which she then rejects when Terry falls from a windowsill and dies, despite the assistance of a kindly passer-by who takes them to a vet. Joyce is now able to take any post – including, fortuitously, one with the widowed kindly passer-by and his family.

‘Magnolia Blossom’ finds Theodora Darrell leaving her husband Richard in favour of Vincent Easton, only to return from Dover when she reads that his firm has collapsed. Richard is open to prosecution if ‘certain papers’ are destroyed, which happen to be in the possession of Vincent. He asks Theo to retrieve them, which she does; Vincent, very nobly, hands them over with no objections and she burns them. On her return to Richard she realises that he expected her to agree to the bargain he expected Vincent to strike. “You sold me, your own wife, to purchase safety!” And she leaves, understandably.

To the surprise of The Reader, the stories in this collection really were worth publishing in book form. Problem in Pollensa Bay is not merely for completionists.

While the Light Lasts (1997) was a – potentially – final attempt to make as much money from the Agatha Christie back catalogue as possible.

‘The House of Dreams’ is the story of John Segrave, ‘a sacrifice on the altar of finance.’ His boss’s daughter Maisie likes him, but he has fallen for her friend Allegra. He has vivid dreams of The House, which is beautiful yet in which “dwells a Thing wholly and utterly horrible.” Allegra tells him that she will never marry because insanity runs in her family.

Ten years later, having abandoned finance and gone to Africa, John dreams that The House is empty. He learns that Allegra is dead and dreams his way to his own death, in which The House is welcoming. Christie rather liked this genre of fey mysticism.

‘The Actress’ is Olga Stormer, neé Nancy Taylor, a victim of attempted blackmail by Jake Levitt who knew her when she was Nancy. She invites him to discuss the matter and lures him into a trap by doping her understudy (!) and pretending to be her own maid.

‘The Edge’ is the tale of Clare, who sees Vivien Lee at a country hotel when she ought to be in Bournemouth, which is what she told her husband Sir George. Clare is tempted to tell George but decides that “no personal feelings should weigh with her” and thus gives way to “the slow, creeping blight of spiritual pride.”

One year later, with the threat hanging over her, Vivien jumps off the cliff to spare her lover, Cyril. And Clare goes over the mental edge, insisting thereafter that she killed Vivien.

This is one of Christie’s most acute psychological observations. Clare is a plausible and well-drawn character who surrenders to the greater temptation of keeping her conscience in a box.

‘Christmas Adventure’ was originally published in December 1923 and was repurposed in a longer form as the title story of ‘The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding’ in 1960. It’s an entertaining yarn about a stolen ruby and a double-fake murder with which Poirot smokes out the thief.

‘The Lonely God’ is in the British Museum and becomes a small totem for artist Frank Oliver. He meets a fellow devotee, who finally leaves a note saying she can’t marry. He has a great success, based on a story she wrote incognito, and they meet again at the Lonely God. Christie called it “regrettably sentimental.” That’s fine, every once in a while.

‘Manx Gold’ was written as part of a scheme to bring visitors to the Isle of Man in 1930. It’s essentially a Treasure Hunt, which makes practically no sense out of context. The Christie people really were scraping the barrel here.

‘Within a Wall’ concerns Alan Everard, painter, and Isobel his more assertive wife. Jane, godmother to their daughter Winnie, lives in a small Battersea flat. (The Reader is reminded of Chesterton’s comment that everyone at some point will live in a Battersea flat). Jane gives Isobel money for Winnie and then dies, after which Alan discovers that Isobel used some of the money for herself. Jane, who loved Alan, paid for his artistic freedom. Now she is dead, he must serve Isobel and paint society portraits to keep her in dresses.

‘The Mystery of the Baghdad Chest’ was originally published in 1932 and was repurposed in 1960, without Hastings’ narration, as ‘The Mystery of the Spanish Chest.’ It’s basically the same story: a jealous husband hides in a chest and is stabbed by the man who suggested the idea, hoping to frame the host for murder.

The title story concerns George and Deidre Crozier, en route to Walters’ tobacco business in Rhodesia. She misses her late first husband, Tim, who was killed in the war. Overcome by a sense of terror, Deidre is escorted back to the house by Mr Arden, who is none other than Tim (“they must have mistaken another chap for me”).

They intend to tell George, but Deidre resists and allows Tim to believe she’s pregnant. Having taken to her bed, George informs her the following morning that ‘Mr Arden’ shot himself. She will be forever haunted by the smell of tobacco.

This collection probably wasn’t worth publishing. It’s like a Greatest Hits Vol IV album – you know by this stage that it’s only for dedicated fans who would hate themselves for living without it. Still, it is Agatha Christie and ‘The Edge,’ if nothing else, is insightful and mildly disconcerting.

We are surprised and provisionally delighted to find ourselves back at The Dolphin Theatre, last seen in Death at the Dolphin sixteen years previously. Peregrine Jay is still in charge and is now directing Macbeth. Sir Dougal (Macbeth) takes Maggie (Lady Macbeth) to dinner; she is interested only in character notes. Nina (Lady Macduff) is superstitious. Gaston, eccentric armourer, plays Seyton and makes claymores (claidheamh-mor, he insists). He choreographs the final fight between Dougal and Simon (Macduff), who also fancies Maggie. Rangi, one of the three witches, gets drunk and does something Maori that may or may not be tapu.

The Reader suspects that this is really Marsh’s version of Macbeth, which is very interesting. Bruce (Banquo) is the ‘sea lawyer’ and extreme-left Equity Rep, irritating bastard almost certainly drawn from life. Dougal “did not make a pass at me,” Maggie assures Simon, “and if he had I’d have been perfectly well able to cope,” strong independent woman that she is. The success of the rehearsals seems to lead to a sense of oppression. Rangi’s grandfather was, we learn, a cannibal.

Demonstrating a fall onto a covered mattress, Perry falls on a covered claymore and injures himself. A cutting sent to his house reveals that the father of William (Young Macduff) is in Broadmoor for a series of decapitation murders; he is known, inelegantly, as the Hampstead Chopper. At a full run, someone hangs a mask of dead Banquo in Duncan’s room (offstage) to disturb Macduff and Macbeth. Shortly after, Banquo’s head is revealed as a ‘main dish’ at the banquet. Perry finally calls out whomever is attempting to bolster the Macbeth superstition.

William is understandably distressed. Rangi is surprised to find the front half of a dead rat in his bag instead of a sailor’s thumb. Winter Morris, theatre manager, finds a note in his in-tray, typed on his own machine, telling him “murderers sons in co.” Nonetheless, the first night goes very well even though Alleyn is present. The Reader is surprised to learn that the play was preceded by the National Anthem. The reviews are excellent and one reads ‘AT LAST! A FLAWLESS MACBETH!’ Three-fifths of the way through the novel and Alleyn has barely said a word.

Part Two begins one month later. Perry takes his older sons (15 and 9) to the play. Unexpectedly, we are told only that an accident has happened. Alleyn disperses a stage-door crowd. Only after the final curtain did Gaston scream at the real head on his claymore, that of Dougal. Someone has taken the final fight rather literally. Gaston helpfully explains the process by which Macbeth is decapitated (offstage). Alleyn surmises that it must have been done after Macbeth and Macduff exited, fighting; this allows about three and a half minutes. They re-enact the final scenes and Alleyn concludes that three and a half minutes isn’t enough time.

Perry decides to retire Macbeth and revive The Glove (from Death at the Dolphin). William comes to tea with the Jays. It turns out that his father killed Bruce’s wife whilst he was on tour in the USSR and Bruce played the ‘practical jokes’ in an attempt to have William removed from the cast. The audition notice is dated 31 May 1982, which is remarkable. Not the date itself, which is unremarkable, but specific dates are almost unknown in detective novels. At most it’s usually 19--. This fixes Alleyn’s career at a minimum of 48 years.

There is, it seems, only one solution to the murder. The astute reader might have got there already.

The murderer lives in a “cul-de-sac off Alleyn road.” Of course he does. He says that he was the ‘demented agent’ of the claidheamh-mor and grants that he “was as proud as Lucifer.” Gaston killed Macbeth when he came offstage before the final scene and assumed the role in the fight. Robin Jay spotted that he wasn’t the ‘real’ Macbeth because Seyton’s heavy belt had left an imprint in his tunic.

Light Thickens is far more about Macbeth than it is a whodunit, the murder being rather Grand Guignol and included more as an obligation than the crux of the plot. Still, as Alleyn has been quoting Macbeth for forty-eight years it seems an appropriate final curtain.

Ngaio Marsh, DBE, died in February 1982 at the age of eighty-six, shortly before the publication of Light Thickens.

The Return of Mr Campion (1989) is the collected final sweepings from the files of Margery Allingham.

‘The Case is Altered’ finds Campion off to Underhill for Christmas, guest of the Cookhams. (As may have been said before, where would the detective novel be without Christmas?)

Peter, Cookham’s secretary, hides a wrapped package in an inglenook. It is for Victor Preen, aero-heir, who is trying to blackmail him for information on government contracts.

‘My Friend Mr Campion’ is the transcript of a broadcast Allingham gave in 1935. It’s a charming account of Campion’s subtle insinuation into becoming her livelihood. Campion was born on 20 May 1900, exactly four years before Allingham, making him ten years younger than Peter Wimsey.

‘The Dog Day’ is the case of an unexpected dog at a hotel, who has been trained to feign illness to effect introductions.

‘The Wind Glass’ was a gift from Mr Tio Yasen, Japanese citizen, when his proposal is rejected by Aieda Chigwell. Mrs Chigwell thinks it’s calling something evil and Mr Chigwell sees something wicked in the garden. The evil thing comes for Aieda and her younger siblings, but the spell is broken when she accidentally breaks the glass. This is a slightly anti-climactic means of ending an otherwise eerie story.

‘The Beauty King’ is very odd, very unlike Allingham and not published until 1969. It seems to be about love.

‘The Black Tent’ is that of a fortune-teller at an engagement ball. The 15yo sister of the fiancée behaves strangely. An American whose late wife was a blackmail victim comes to see Campion, who puts two and two together and traps the fortune-teller.

‘Sweet and Low’ is a pleasant story of matchmaking and a horse with its own mischievous agenda. It was rejected as unsuitable for Strand magazine (and where would the whodunit be without Strand magazine?)

‘Once in a Lifetime’ is a rather sweet tale of young lovers accidentally reunited on a train many years later. Each thinks, incorrectly, that they have not been recognised by the other.

‘The Kernel of Truth’ is all about the vital significance of nutmeg. The Reader cannot begin to imagine how Allingham found the time to write all of these digressions.

‘Happy Christmas’ is not a crime story. Mr & Mrs Robinson, a young couple who collect Victoriana, invite old Miss Martindale down from the top floor for Christmas and everything is touched with a Dickensian glow.

‘The Wisdom of Esdras’ is a curious early story of a young man who accidentally kills himself in attempting to assist a ghost. A lesson for us all.

‘The Curious Affair in Nut Row’ is another reminiscence of Charlie Luke. An organisation wants an ancient fish and hires an actor to impersonate an eccentric tenant, so that the theft of the fish from its institutional owner can be facilitated. The crime is foiled thanks to a cinema-mad shop assistant.

‘What to do with an Ageing Detective’ is an incredibly meta first-person account of Allingham bumping into Lugg.

If you see a second-hand copy for the equivalent of $5 or less and/or you are a dedicated completionist, buy The Return of Mr Campion. Otherwise, no harm would have been done in letting these stories, pleasant and weightless, continue to gather dust.

In ‘Sanctuary,’ Bunch Harmon, wife of the vicar of Chipping Cleghorn (both last seen in A Murder is Announced), finds a dying man on the chancel steps. He says ‘sanctuary’ and something that she takes as ‘Julian,’ her husband’s name. A Mr & Mrs Eccles claim him as her brother and are very keen to claim his possessions. Bunch, suspicious, goes to see Miss Marple, staying in Raymond’s London flat.

Bunch thinks the Eccleses were ‘wrong’; moreover, they misnamed the dead man. Bunch found a ticket for Paddington cloakroom in the ripped lining of the dead man’s coat. Not for the first time, The Reader wonders where the whodunnit would be without the station cloakroom.

On arrival at Chipping Cleghorn, Bunch has her suitcase snatched. The police intervene and the contents do indeed belong to her. Inspector Craddock tells a long, complicated story about an exotic dancer and an emerald necklace. The Paddington suitcase contains the costume of the exotic dancer, the emeralds, a marriage certificate (between the late dancer and the recently deceased jailbird) and a birth certificate of their daughter, Jewel, now fostered in Chipping Cleghorn under the name of Jill. Miss Marple deployed her former maid to deposit a duplicate suitcase at Paddington cloakroom, which fooled the thieves into tailing Bunch.

‘Strange Jest’ is that of Uncle Mathew, recently deceased relative of Edward and Charmain, who appears to have left them buried treasure. Miss Marple irritates them but does find the secret drawer in Mathew’s escritoire. This includes a recipe for gammon and spinach and a letter from Betty Martin, which lead her to deduce that the treasure is the rare Victorian stamp on the envelope. This may perhaps be a good story for a Christmas magazine but is very silly.

‘Tape-Measure Murder’ finds Miss Pollitt, dressmaker, unable to rouse Mrs Spenlow, client. This, as Miss Hartnell discovers, is because she is dead, strangled. Constable Palk, who has a pin in his tunic, comes to see Miss Marple because Mr Spenlow says he called to see her on her request. She never made any such phone call. The police are suspicious.

Mrs Spenlow, who began as a between-maid, was rich. Her original ‘place,’ the Abercrombies’, was the site of a jewel heist. Ted Gerard, reformed thief, has been spending a lot of time with Mrs Spenlow. Mr Spenlow adopts a position of Chinese impassivity but, as Miss Marple points out with her gift for comparative anthropology, “the people of St Mary Mead react rather differently.”

Miss Marple takes a dress to be altered because she recognised Palk’s pin as a dressmaker’s pin; Miss Pollitt got there early, strangled her and then pretended to arrive. It was she who called Mr Spenlow from the Post Office. She was part of the Abercrombie jewel heist but her fortunes were not that of Mrs Spenlow, who she feared was about to confess under the influence of Ted Gerard…

‘The Case of the Caretaker’ is a short work by Dr Haydock, a case from his experience that he has written as a pick-me-up for Miss Marple. Scapegrace Harry Laxton returns to the home of his youth with a new bride; he buys and rebuilds Kingsdean House, pensioning off the ancient caretaker. His former fling is now married to the chemist. Old Murgatroyd the caretaker casts aspersions and mutters imprecations. Louise Luxton is fairly bored and bothered when Murgatroyd curses them for being ‘turned out’ of Kingsdean. Harry pays for Murgatroyd’s passage to the USA but, three days later, she startles Louise’s horse, which bolts. Louise is thrown, taken into the house and dies without regaining consciousness. Miss Marple supposes that Harry paid Murgatroyd to threaten them, startled his own horse and finished off Louise with a drug. Rather feebly, Dr Haydock only happened upon the murder because a syringe fell from Harry’s pocket.

‘The Case of the Perfect Maid’ begins when Miss Marple’s maid Edna’s tells her that Gladys, her cousin, has been ‘let go’ by the Misses Skinner and her honesty is now being doubted. Emily Skinner enjoys ill-health and Lavinia does her bidding. They employ Mary Higgins, the perfect maid. Miss Marple is suspicious and, on the eleventh day, Mary absconds with loot from the Skinners’ and neighbouring flats. Miss Marple, who has cleverly obtained Mary’s fingerprints, suggests to Inspector Slack that Mary and Emily are one and the same person, as indeed they are.

‘Miss Marple Tells a Story’ is a rare first-person narrative, told to Raymond and Joan. Mr Petherick the solicitor (from The Thirteen Problems) brings Mr Rhodes, suspected of killing his wife, for a consultation. She was stabbed in her hotel room, adjoining his, and witnesses attest that only Mr Rhodes and the chambermaid entered or left their rooms. Mrs Rhodes had fussed over threatening letters from the mother of a child she’d killed in a road accident, but she always enjoyed crying wolf. Miss Marple deduced that it must have been one of the other female guests in the hotel who disguised herself as a chambermaid, working on the Chestertonian principle that nobody really sees a chambermaid.

The final two stories are not Miss Marple cases, final or otherwise.

‘The Dressmaker’s Doll’ has suddenly imprinted herself on everyone’s psyche. She is found sitting at the desk and seems to have developed the ability to move herself at will, even through locked doors. The dressmakers fear that she hates them and wants the whole shop. This eerie premise is slightly spoiled by a weak ending when the doll is thrown out of a window and taken off by a small girl, who asserts that the doll just ‘wanted to be loved.’

‘In a Glass Darkly’ finds the narrator, staying with his friend Nigel and Nigel’s brother Alan, witnessing a murder in his mirror – but the open door seen in reflection is actually a wardrobe in his room. He then meets Sylvia, Nigel’s sister, who is the woman in the mirror. He tells her what he saw and she breaks her engagement. Nigel dies in 1916 and the ex-fiancée in 1918, so after the war he can marry Sylvia. Unfortunately, he is madly jealous and pursues her to Alan’s house, where they first met – and is prevented from strangling her only by seeing their reflection in the mirror.

As with all these posthumous collections, they’re not first-rate stories but they were worth publishing and definitely worth reading. It is always a pleasure to see Miss Marple and she is on good form.

Editor’s note: written over many years, they had been published in the author’s lifetime in various American collections. Go figure.

Photo-Finish (1980) implausibly contrives to sweep Alleyn and Troy to New Zealand. She is invited by wealthy Montagu Reece to paint Isabella (‘La’) Sommita, opera diva, his supposed other half. Alleyn is invited by Reece to keep an eye out for ‘Strix,’ guerrilla photographer who takes embarrassing snapshots and sells them to newspapers. He is inclined to refuse but the AC wants him to go as part of a watching brief for narcotics.

The ensemble fetches up on The Island, Reece’s Westland retreat. It includes Rupert, beautiful young man, who wrote a one-act opera for her and rapidly became her protégé, secretary and lover. He is stricken by a suspicion that his opera isn’t worth the performance. Beppo Lattienzo, her voice master, helpfully brings Troy up to speed on The Alien Corn, Rupert’s piece. Also on hand are Ben Ruby, her manager, and Ned Hanley, Monty’s secretary. The evening paper, The Watchman, unfortunately carries a (presumed forged) letter from Sommita, denying that her bosom isn’t entirely natural. She once gave an autograph to a disguised Strix, which Alleyn assumes was used.

Rupert is distressed at the Alleyns, wanting to pull the opera and realising he’s in over his head. “The gilt’s gone off the gingerbread but the gingerbread is still compulsive eating,” Alleyn sagely observes. Marco, one of the staff, says he disturbed someone in the helicopter hangar and, in pursuit, found a lens-cap.

The author quotes from Henry IV Part One, unexpectedly. Alien Corn, with imported first-rate cast and audience, passes without incident. Rupert attempts an apologetic curtain speech but faints. The local storm prompts an early exit of guests whom the author wants to get out of the way. Sommita is found stabbed in her bedroom, a photograph pinned to the body with a stiletto taken from the wall. The photo was taken of the rehearsal from outside the building, indicating that Strix was (and is) on the island – but not necessarily the murderer. Mrs Bacon the housekeeper sensibly concludes that the murderer must be One of Us.

Four people have sufficiently impressive cameras. Dr Carmichael, helpfully on hand, agrees with Alleyn that she was asphyxiated and stabbed after death. Maria, her devoted Italian maid-cum-dresser, confirms that Sommita returned to her room at 9.20pm in an emotional ferment. Maria and Monty say she locked her door and presumably admitted the murderer. The key is found neatly placed in a handbag in a drawer, which seems very tidy for a murderer. Alleyn quotes Othello. Hanley mentions Freud and Lattienzo mentions Strindberg.

Alleyn tells Carmichael that Strix did take the photo but did not commit the murder. Sommita’s biography indicates links to a Sicilian vendetta and possibly the drug trade. Sleepless, Hanley – an obvious homosexual – talks to Alleyn. He is catty about Rupert. Sleepless, Rupert claims a desire to burn his score. He’s actually trying to retrieve an emotional message he left for Sommita on a fragment of the score: ‘soon it will all be over.’ He says that he gave his key to Maria, on her request, and accidentally reveals that he has seen the corpse. Maria, claiming a Catholic need to prepare the body, woke the guard Alleyn placed on Sommita’s bedroom at 4.20am. He now has her, or possibly Rupert’s, key.

The storm lessens but the launch is out of action – obviously. Alleyn is adept at signalling – obviously. Monty more or less confirms Sommita’s biography, including her fear of the Rossi family vengeance. The lens-cap found by Marco is not right for Strix. He is truculent. Ben Ruby suspects operatic Italians. Troy and Carmichael find a half-burnt envelope in the grate, addressed to The Watchman. Sommita dictated a furious letter that Hanley typed and Reece removed. Marco, who is Strix, used the envelope for his photo.

The New Zealand Police finally arrive. Alleyn and the chief kiwi keep watch in Sommita’s massive wardrobe, from whence they emerge to arrest Maria.

Alleyn addresses the household from “that widely accepted throne of authority, the hearthrug.” He reveals that Maria saw Marco, removed the photo and skewered it to the corpse as part of the vendetta. She and Monty (Reece, né Rossi) actually killed her. The evidence of the various keys proves that they lied; ergo, they killed her. This is all quite clever and also vaguely disappointing: why bring the Alleyns halfway round the world for a decent whodunit, only to make it a mafia honour killing? New Zealand is very picturesque and one doesn’t begrudge the author her native landscape, but the novel could have been set anywhere.

Returning from a surly evening at Syd’s pad with Syd and Miss Harkness, Ricky bumps into Ferrant, night-fishing – he says – with Louis Pharamond, Jasper’s cousin. A fisherman’s van giving Ricky and Syd a lift to the port has a close encounter with Miss Harkness and Mungo the horse. Syd is off to the mainland to press Jerome et Cie paint on Troy, where he is not well.

At Harkness’ stable, Jasper’s 13yo brother Bruno is scolded for successfully jumping a gap in the hedge. Mr Harkness is fire-and-brimstone, Miss (Dulcie) Harkness is ‘high-spirited’ and, perhaps not coincidentally, pregnant. Ricky enjoys a day’s riding with the Pharamonds, until they return to find Dulcie dead in the ditch at the gap Bruno earlier jumped, with a sorrel mare limping in the field.

Sergeant Plank and the vet agree that the sorrel mare came down on the far side of the gap and then kicked and fell on Dulcie. Ziegfeldt, the offstage drug lord from When in Rome, seems to be using this island as an entrepôt. The local superintendent is in hospital with a perforated appendix, so the AC of Scotland Yard asks Alleyn to investigate the death. Of course he does.

Ricky and Plank both noticed freshly cut wire scars on wooden hedgeposts and a gash on the mare’s leg. Ricky, Syd and Ferrant all go to St Pierre des Roches on the mainland, home of Jerome et Cie. In the midst of a storm, someone pushes Ricky into the harbour. Alleyn arrives on the island, officially investigating the drug trade. His fluent French charms Mme Ferrant. Mr Harkness is hitting the bottle.

A recently-cut coil of wire is found in the stables. The gash on the mare’s leg fits the wire. There is some question as to the length of time the wire remained between the hedgeposts and who removed it… there is also some question about the father of Dulcie’s child. It could be almost anybody.

Mrs Plank is happy to gossip about the Ferrants and suspects that young Louis Ferrant is the biological son of Louis Pharamond, who – claiming cramp – left the ride early. Syd ignored Harkness’ instructions and did not take the sorrel mare to be re-shod. A note in Dulcie’s jacket confirms that she had a rendezvous on the clifftop with (the older) Louis, which he is forced to admit. The French narcotics squad confirms that Ferrant has visited a very rich man near Marseilles.

Ricky scopes out Syd’s pad, only to be confronted by Ferrant with a gun. Mrs Plank also thinks Ferrant took Dulcie on his boat, the dinghy of which has recently been used. Alleyn suspects that young Louis took the dinghy out at night to retrieve his (supposed) father, who had been dropped off by one of the drug ring.

Syd and Ferrant take Ricky hostage and make him write a letter to Alleyn linking his health to their departure. Young Louis brings a note from his mother and takes Ricky’s note to the police station, where Mrs Plank reads it and takes it to Alleyn as he, unbeknownst, approaches Syd’s pad with a couple of policemen and a search warrant for drugs. Ferrant and Syd are eventually snaffled. Ricky’s ankles were bound with wire from the stables. Drugs are found in the tubes of paint.

Harkness leaves a note stating that he will expose sinners at the Sunday meeting of his slightly odd sect. The older Louis has fled. Julia turns out to be a Lamprey, for no reason The Reader can adduce beyond the amusement of the author. Syd tries to implicate Ferrant for Dulcie’s murder.

At the service, amid a storm of biblical proportions, Harkness denounces almost everyone before retreating to his own room and hanging himself, he being the father of Dulcie’s child and the culprit who rigged the wire between the posts. The Reader idly wonders if that qualifies as murder, given that he couldn’t have guaranteed it would result in her death; possibly this is why Marsh prompts him to commit suicide. It’s entertaining and surprisingly long, 277 pages in The Reader’s paperback; probably longer than necessary, in all honesty, but a good yarn for all that.

Grave Mistake (1978) opens with the ladies of Upper Quintern, Kent, whose meeting is slightly spoiled by the discovery of a dead gardener. Fortunately, the recently-widowed Mrs Black’s recently-arrived brother is a good gardener and is eagerly snapped up. He has a Scottish accent and is genuinely called Gardener.

Nikolas Markos, rich newcomer to the district, gives a dinner at Mardling Manor. Verity Preston, lady and playwright, is stunned to meet Basil Smythe, a medical student she knew 25 years previously and now calling himself Dr Schramm. Verity has a play at the Dolphin, obviously. Markos has bought a Troy painting, obviously.

Gideon Markos and Prunella Foster are nearly engaged. Sybil Foster, of the much-coveted Quintern Place, checks into ‘Greengages,’ a hotel with expensive R&R facilities that employs Dr Schramm. Sybil’s ghastly stepson Claud turns up. (Sybil married Maurice Carter, whose wife died in childbirth. Maurice was a soldier in a Scottish regiment who died in the Blitz shortly afterwards. Sybil would later marry Mr Foster, now dead. Got it?)

Verity, her goddaughter Prue and Gideon go to Greengages; separately, so do Bruce Gardener and Claud. At 10.30 that evening, Dr Schramm ‘phones Prue to tell her that Sybil is dead. The inquest declares that she died of a barbiturate overdose. The local doctor suggests that she was developing Parkinson’s disease. Suicide is assumed.

Mr Rattisbon Jr, presumably son of the Mr Rattisbon last seen thirty years previously in Final Curtain, attended the inquest. Prue finds a new will that favouring Bruce, Dr Schramm and herself – with a greater inheritance if she marries Lord Swingletree. (She won’t do this).

One week later, Alleyn appears to talk to Verity. They quote Hamlet. Alleyn goes to Quintern Place, where Bruce and ‘Mrs Jim’ the help are severally helpful. He also accosts Claud, eavesdropping in a shed, who admits that he saw the new will being placed in the desk but disclaims knowledge of the contents. Alleyn gives a helpful update to Fox, noting that the autopsy was inconclusive regarding the effect of the barbiturates.

When Prue and Gideon marry, Nikolas will live with them at Quintern Place, saving him the bother of trying to buy it. Schramm tells them that he had become engaged to Sybil. The dead lilies in Syb’s room at Greengages, brought by Bruce and taken to the room by an electrician, allow Alleyn to quote Hamlet again. He is very suspicious of the electrician, given that nothing in the room has been repaired. Sister Jackson (“150lb of active femininity”) confirms that Schramm ordered Syb’s stomach to be pumped.

The absurd will is proved, to the delight of Claud who gets his share of his father’s inheritance. He doesn’t get his father’s rare stamp, a Tsarist Empire ‘Black Alexander’, because it was assumed lost in a direct wartime hit on the bank. Alleyn finds dead lily-heads in the broom cupboard opposite the door of Syb’s room. He also finds staining, a lipstick trace and a probable bite-mark on the underside of a pillow…

…but there are no fingerprints on the tumbler, the pill bottle and the Scotch.

Basil Smythe did not complete his course in Lausanne, as he claimed. He took the identity of the late Dr Schramm. Fox conjectures a doping and smothering that fits the known movements of Claud. Alleyn is very interested in Maurice Carter’s final letter to Syb and also in his soldier-servant, whose strabismus bears a striking resemblance to that of Bruce. The Reader calculates that Bruce must be at least in his mid-fifties, but then Alleyn must be in his eighties so Time is an illusion.

Markos claims to have met Schramm [sic] on the QEII. Bruce digs Syb’s grave. Plans of Quintern Place are revealed to have a pencilled X in the old stables; Alleyn’s investigations unearth recent excavations, suggesting that somebody with knowledge of the plans is digging for treasure. A rough copy of the plans is found in Claud’s wardrobe, although Claud himself has disappeared.

Bruce’s ‘daftie’ assistant, conveniently for the plot, saw Claud around midnight from his hideout under a hedge. We learn that Basil once forged Verity’s father’s signature and has fraudulently posed as qualified. Claud made the deposit on a car but hasn’t turned up to buy it…

Sister Jackson receives a note demanding £500 for silence about her visit to Syb’s room, around 9pm on the Fatal Evening. She talks to Alleyn at a pub and is followed by Basil, who is very unpleasant and accuses her of wanting Syb dead. She is a ‘woman scorned’ who didn’t mention her visit due to understandable self-preservation.

Alleyn, Fox and the local sergeant ‘reconstruct’ Bruce’s Gothic night of gravedigging, whereupon Alleyn is felled by half a brick. The Anglo-Catholic vicar, depicted sympathetically, is present at the opening of Syb’s grave in a sympathetic downpour. The coffin is removed and Claud is found underneath, with the stamp - the buried treasure - in his pocket. It could only have been Bruce who killed Claud, although he didn’t know that Claud got to the stamp first. Claud was also blackmailing him for murdering Syb.

This is another longish Marsh that meanders pleasantly along, with interesting dramatis personae and a satisfying solution. The title is probably too much of a giveaway for anyone paying attention, but there weren’t many writers producing decent whodunits at the age of 83.

Fortunately, Bloom & Vlastnik have some more great scores from so-so shows. Jerry Herman’s flop Mack and Mabel is wonderful, as we have established many times, and his flop Dear World (1969) has much to enjoy. The original saw Angela Lansbury fighting The System, which wants to exploit oil beneath Paris (this was in the spirit of the age, when the late Paul Erlich was beginning his career of being Totally and Utterly Wrong About Everything, Including Oil). She was by all accounts the best thing in a show that swamped Jean Giraudoux’s 1940s source material, the creators having “shoved the material into a pre-existing genre.” Giraudoux should not become an orthodox Broadway musical.

That said, some of Dear World is first-rate Herman. ‘I Don’t Want to Know’ is one of the best torch songs devoted to that fine, fine line between ideals and illusion:

“Let me hide ev’ry truth from my eyes with the back of my hand,
Let me live in a world full of lies with my head in the sand.
For my memories all are exciting,
My memories all are enchanting,
My memories burn in my head with a steady glow;
So if, my friends, if love is dead,
I don’t want to know”

This was sitting down on The Julie Andrews Hour… imagine what she was like onstage.

‘Kiss Her Now’ is lovely and ‘And I Was Beautiful’ even better, one of those songs that says it all in only one verse of nine lines:

“He stood and looked at me
And I was beautiful,
For it was beautiful how he believed in me.
His love was strong enough to make me anything,
So I was ev’rything he wanted me to be.
But then he walked away and took my smile with him,
And now the years blur by, but ev’ry now and then,
I stop and think of him and how he looked at me,
And all at once I’m beautiful again”

Mordden likes Giraudoux and likes Herman and despairs at Dear World, grumbling that “it’s almost irritating to report that most of the score is wonderful as sheer music… another misleading cast album, forgiving the sins of a corrupt adaptation.”

Harold (Wizard of Oz) Arlen, report Bloom & Vlastnik, “hit the great score / so-so show trifecta with House of Flowers, Jamaica and St Louis Woman.”

The latter was chronologically first, opening in 1946 with music by Arlen and lyrics by the great Johnny Mercer. The former was based on a Truman Capote short story and Capote himself wrote book and lyrics. Capote didn’t have much luck with musical adaptations of his work: Breakfast at Tiffany’s crashed and burned and was yanked before it reached Broadway; some of the score for The Grass Harp is wonderful yet the show didn’t succeed. In Cold Blood, funnily enough, has not been the subject of a musical adaptation.

Jamaica, with lyrics by Yip (Wizard of Oz) Harburg, actually ran.

“If the score were all that mattered,” sighed Mordden, “St Louis Woman would have succeeded.” It was apparently a slow show, the glories of which didn’t compensate for its longueurs. The cast included the Nicholas Brothers, first-class triple threats and heaven-sent dancers, and Pearl Bailey, who could have set fire to a damp rag.

Arlen’s languorous music introduces one of my favourite songs of the decade, a hymn to wanderlust:

“Free and easy, that’s my style
Howdy-do me, watch me smile
But fare thee well me after ‘while
‘Cause I gotta roam
And any place I hang my hat is home”

Very rarely does a single couplet illustrate a character as perfectly as this:

“Cross the river, ‘round the bend
Howdy, stranger, so long, friend”

Assessing this as an acting performance, which is probably inappropriate, one would say that the character is deeply conflicted about her wandering. It really makes me wish that Judy Garland had lived to play a revival of Gypsy.

And here’s another (non-rhyming) couplet that says as much as entire songs from less-competent lyricists:

“I’m gonna love you like no one’s loved you
Come rain or come shine”

All right, Johnny Mercer is essentially paraphrasing the marriage service, but so what? It’s excellent source material. Sad to say, he never did enjoy a Broadway hit. (His Wikipedia page, for what it’s worth, almost entirely ignores his Broadway work).

House of Flowers (1954), “a light and almost plotless, but by all intelligent accounts gorgeous, je ne sais quoi [about a bordello in Port-au-Prince] opened on Broadway as a kind of nuclear puff of smoke.” That’s difficult to imagine: what sort of musical can be likened to a mushroom cloud? One with Pearl Bailey and Juanita Hall, that’s what; a “black and devilishly erotic” show, that’s what; one “simmering with ineffable ballads,” that’s what.

But what on earth is an ineffable ballad? Mordden’s struggle to find the right words would indicate an inherent problem with House of Flowers. It might sound lovely because you don’t have to watch it.

Nobody could mistake Capote, as a lyricist, with Cole Porter or Oscar Hammerstein. Sometimes he wanders all over the place, which could be justified when it amplifies the tenor of the show. More often than not, he captures the demotic rather better than Porter (whose demos tended to sound rather like Porter):

“A stone rolled off my heart when I laid my eyes on
That near-to-me boy with that faraway look
And right from the start, I saw a new horizon
And a road to take me where I wanted to be took
Needed to be took

And though I never has seen snow
All the same I know
Nothing will ever be
Nothing can ever be beautiful as my love is
Like my love is to me”

(Porter would have appreciated the sly “needed to be took”).

“When people hear the original Broadway cast recording,” muses Ken Mandelbaum, “they can’t imagine how the show could ever have failed.” It may have had something to do with Pearl Bailey, wonderful onstage but a diva behind the scenes. There simply may not have been much of an audience for a musical about The Best Little Whorehouse in Haiti.

Jamaica (1957), by all intelligent accounts, also sounds better than it played. It starred Lena Horne, which can’t have been the only reason it ran longer than the two Pearl Bailey shows put together. Who knows? Sometimes these things happen. Harburg was a reliably entertaining lyricist, as with the gather-ye-rosebuds reminder that life is fleeting:

“Napoleon’s a pastry
Get this under your brow
What once useta be a roosta’
Is just a dusta’ now”

‘Push de Button’ is a sardonic hymn to modern conveniences and ‘Leave de Atom Alone’ contains one of the most bizarre couplets on 1950s Broadway:

“But not since the doom day in old Babylon
Did he fool with anything so diabolical as the cyclotron”

Satire tends to date, which might explain why most people would struggle to recognise anything from Jamaica.

Leslie Bricusse, whose inconsistency as a lyricist makes Stephen Schwartz look solid and reliable, wrote two very Sixties musicals with Anthony Newley: Stop the World – I Want to Get Off (1961) and The Roar of the Greasepaint – the Smell of the Crowd (1965). As much as I revere Bloom & Vlastnik, I wouldn’t call either a great score. As happens quite a lot with Bricusse, especially when writing with Newley, too many of the songs beat the audience over the head telling them how to react. Of course every song, every line of a play, is trying to direct the audience in a certain direction, but a little subtlety is (to quote Screwtape) more effective and better style.

“What kind of man is this?
An empty shell
A lonely cell in which
An empty heart must dwell”

That teeters on the edge of Dr Seuss. And the music, let alone Newley’s rendition, is so insistent that one becomes resistant. (Trite rhyming is contagious and by no means advantageous).

Newley is obviously overacting here, which bothers me. Is he not taking it seriously? Is this how it was done in the theatre? Is it part of the character? Is it a massive double-bluff? Who can tell?

‘Typically English’ at least suggests a little wit:

“We’ve a typically English spaniel
Who likes typically English walks
Past the typically English trees upon the heath
And if anyone asks me how I like
This typically English life
I am fed up to my typically English teeth”

Millicent Martin, acting a stylized stage performance for camera - no mean feat - achieves an honesty that Newley either couldn’t or couldn’t be bothered to produce. The leading man is Tony Tanner, who went on to win a Tony nomination for directing Joseph. He should have won a Medal of Honor for directing Joseph.

Complete with a conceit straight from the seventeenth-century:

“When a typically English rosebud
Is in typically English bloom
And her typically English petals open wide
Then her typically English perfume
Reaches typically English bees
And what follows is really most undignified!”

Hmmm… I have nothing against blatant imagery per se, and maybe it’s just me, but the coarseness strikes a wrong note and could easily have been avoided.

‘Mumbo Jumbo,’ a series of political platitudes on the campaign trail, is a good joke that could have been funnier with another couple of hours’ work and a bottle of wine. The best song may be the jaunty secular revival number, ‘Gonna Build a Mountain,’ especially if you can get over Newley’s insistence on singing moun-TAIN to rhyme with pain. It’s so distracting. Nobody in the world says moun-TAIN and I have to hold this song responsible for the dreaded ‘This is the Mo-MENT’ from Jekyll and Hyde, music and lyrics by Frank Wildhorn and Leslie Bricusse. There is no reason why characters in musicals should butcher the language just because the composer can’t be bothered to sort it out.

That aside, it has a straightforward sincerity for which the rest of the score scrabbles and rarely achieves:

“Gonna build me a daydream
From a little hope
Gonna push that daydream
Up the mountain slope
Gonna build a daydream
Gonna see it through
Gonna build a mountain and a daydream
Gonna make them both come true”

Sammy, in the 1978 revival, doesn’t look very well. The song fits him like a glove, although it can’t quite carry a six-minute production number.

Stop the World ran (in the original run; the 1978 revival flopped). Roar of the Greasepaint, the score of which sounds like a knock-off of the earlier show, didn’t; in fact, at 231 performances it qualified for Mandelbaum’s book of flops, but he didn’t see fit to include it. (Alas).

It didn’t even run in Britain; opening in Nottingham with Norman Wisdom in the lead, it never made it to the West End. The American producer of Stop the World, the legendary David ‘I pulled Breakfast at Tiffany’s’ Merrick, brought it over anyway because it was cheap and because Britain was very fashionable in 1965 (which explains one of Roger Miller’s sillier songs, ‘England Swings’ [like a pendulum do]). Merrick insisted that Newley replace Wisdom, to not much effect. We might note in passing that Wisdom went instead into Walking Happy and scored a Tony nomination.

Roar has one decent song, ‘Where Can I Turn To’, which was recorded by Tony Bennett; even so, the lyrics are content to be mediocre:

“Who can I turn to
When nobody needs me?
My heart wants to know
And so I must go
Where destiny leads me”

That’s just meh. Destiny can’t lead you anywhere, it just is; and, if your heart will be satisfied by simply waiting to see what happens, we don’t have much of a show.

“With no star to guide me
And no one beside me,
I’ll go on my way
And after the day
The darkness will hide me”

This annoys me: although it works, and sings reasonably well, it’s so ineffectual. The images are hackneyed and nobody says ‘after the day’ when they mean ‘after the sun sets’. Also, which I appreciate might irk me more than normal people, it is only in the darkness that you would see a star to guide you.

Why am I pursuing this song, you ask? Because Bricusse finally achieves something quite refreshing. When anyone sings ‘tomorrow,’ you know the rhyme will be ‘sorrow’:

“And maybe tomorrow
I’ll find what I’m after.
I’ll throw off my sorrow - ”

No, that’s not refreshing. This is refreshing:

“Beg, steal or borrow
My share of laughter”

But really, one neat metaphor doesn’t make a score. I don’t want to descend into mindless - or even mindful - abuse of Leslie Bricusse, but he seems disproportionately rewarded for a fundamentally second-rate songwriter. Much better to stick with Arlen, Harburg, Herman and Mercer.

Donna Murphy in the 2023 Encores! staging

To everybody’s great joy, Curtain is narrated by HASTINGS, last seen before the war. His (incredibly competent) wife has died in the Argentine and he has been invited by Poirot to, of all places, Styles, where It All Began. Styles is now a guest house run by a Colonel Luttrell and his bossy wife. Poirot, stricken with arthritis and confined to a wheelchair, has recruited Hastings to act as his eyes and ears – to be his faithful dog – so that a murderer can be trapped! Poirot gives him a summary of five apparently unrelated murders, linked only by the shadowy presence of X, currently at Styles. He refuses to tell Hastings the identity of X because Hastings has no capacity whatsoever for dissimulation.

Hastings’ brainy daughter Judith (in her early twenties, which is stretching credibility a touch as her parents married in the early twenties) is also at Styles, assisting Dr Franklin in his research. Mrs Franklin is an invalid. Judith thinks she is a selfish malingerer and sympathises with the removal of ‘useless’ people. (Did Agatha not know of the Nazis’ T4 programme??)

As for the other guests, Hastings admires William Boyd Carrington, former colonial administrator who once loved Mrs Franklin; he thinks Allerton a ‘bad lot’ and regards the bird-watching Norton as a bit gauche. Mrs Luttrell is very mean to her husband over Bridge and Norton is unimpressed. Allerton has a stash of sleeping pills. Poirot instructs Hastings to look for a potential victim of X, i.e. someone who will be plausibly accused of murder.

Mrs Cole, thirty-five, tells Hastings that Mrs Franklin enjoys ill-health. She is actually sister to the murderess in one of Poirot’s five cases. In an unusually poetic flourish, Hastings calls Styles a “collection of twilight people.” Mrs Luttrell scolds her husband for offering drinks and he ‘accidentally’ shoots her with a rook rifle, not fatally. Some wonder if it had been deliberate. Hastings characteristically reasons that X must have shot her from somewhere else. The Reader would like to know more about Hastings’ war service.

Hastings is concerned by the attention paid to Judith by Allerton, a married man with an estranged Catholic wife. Mrs Franklin plays at being feeble and ‘compliments’ her husband’s dedication and insensitivity. Judith insists “only the worthwhile should survive” but that euthanasia ought to be wholly impersonal, negating the possibility of impure motives. The Reader is staggered by this naivete. Norton tells Hastings of a dark incident in Allerton’s past that led to a girl’s suicide. He tries to warn Judith, but she insists that she’ll live her own life. Taking this quite badly, he determines to kill Allerton by swapping aspirin for an overdose of ‘Slumberyl’ (not Veronal, for a change). Poirot, two steps ahead as usual, drugs his hot chocolate and sends him harmlessly to sleep.

“There was something malignant about the air of Styles,” muses Hastings. He seems to be proved right when Mrs Franklin is taken ill after a small coffee party and dies 24 hours later from physostigmine poisoning. Someone entered Franklin’s lab and substituted water for “a strong solution of alkaloids of the calabar bean.” Poirot’s evidence at the inquest leads to a verdict of suicide; he actually thinks it was murder but desires no further inquiry. A bit high-handed, one might think.

Poirot admires the ingenuity of X but still wants to catch him before his own imminent death. Curtiss, Poirot’s attendant, fears a fatal heart attack. Franklin, conveniently for him, can now take a job in Africa. Norton has an ethical dilemma regarding something he says he saw through his field-glasses. Poirot arranges to leave “indications in kind” for Hastings just in case, which he says should make everything obvious. Norton speaks to Poirot and, the following morning, is found dead by pistol shot, the wound in the middle of his forehead. Later that same day, Poirot is also found dead, presumably the victim of a heart attack. His tablets are strangely absent.

Poirot leaves Hastings a copy of Othello and John Ferguson, a 1915 play, along with a note advising him to “talk to my valet Georges.” He is buried in Styles. (Thus supposing a Catholic Church in Styles. One hopes he was also buried in style). Judith will go to Africa as the second Mrs Franklin; Hastings wonders if they killed the first. Georges tells Hastings that Poirot gave him paid leave in order to engage Curtiss. Needless to say, none of this makes it obvious to Hastings.

Fortunately, Poirot knows Hastings very well and leaves a posthumous explanation in the hands of his solicitor. X was the perfect murderer, an Iago-like catalyst (hence Othello) who never murdered anyone but was the cause of murder in others. The exact explanation shall not be revealed here, Curtain being one of the glorious few that you really should discover for yourself. It is quite, quite brilliant and a fitting Curtain to Poirot’s glorious career. (He was given an obituary in the New York Times, which was still a newspaper in 1975).

Curtain the novel is impressive, thanks to the characteristically brilliant plotting of the murders and the pitch-perfect through-a-glass-darkly narration of Hastings. It’s also due to the evocation of claustrophobia; bar the coda after Poirot’s death, it all takes place within Styles. This reminds The Reader of the gathering sense of oppression in, above all, And Then There Were None.

Agatha Christie died on 12 January 1976.

Sleeping Murder (1976) was the final Miss Marple novel to be published. In common with Curtain, it was written during the war as insurance; unlike Curtain, it is not the end for Miss Marple.

Gwenda Reed comes to England from New Zealand to find a house for herself and husband Giles. She finds a seven-bedroom Victorian villa just outside Dillmouth, on the south coast, seven bedrooms apparently being perfectly reasonable for a young couple. She takes the house despite a brief “wave of irrational terror.” Gwenda imagines doors and garden steps that were indeed once where she imagined them. This bothers her, so she accepts the invitation from Raymond and Joan West to enjoy the ‘highbrow atmosphere’ in London, where she naturally meets Miss Marple.

She is, however, so horrified by a line in The Duchess of Malfi (‘cover her face… mine eyes dazzle’) that she runs screaming from the theatre. The Reader suddenly realises that Sleeping Murder couldn’t have been written during the Blitz as Gielgud’s Duchess of Malfi was performed in 1945. Hmm. At least this fixes the date of the novel, in which – remarkably – nobody ever mentions the war and transport presents no difficulties.

Gwenda tells Miss Marple that the line reminded her of ‘Helen,’ strangled by ‘monkey paws.’ She fears she’s going mad, but Miss Marple suggests that she more probably did witness a murder as a very young child through – rather than over – the banister. Gwenda’s aunt writes to confirm that Gwenda had, briefly, been in England with her father and his ill-advised second wife. Miss Marple advises the Reeds to let sleeping murder lie.

Colonel Bantry, still alive, has a former cook who now runs a boarding-house in Dillmouth, conveniently. Good old Somerset House proves that Gwenda’s father, Major Halliday, married Helen Spenlove Kennedy…

An ad. in the Times provokes a letter from Dr Kennedy, Helen’s older half-brother, who vaguely remembers Gwenda and would like news of his sister. He tells them that Helen, after less than a year of marriage, ran off with another man. He received two letters from abroad but lost touch thereafter. Major Halliday suffered from delusions that he’d strangled Helen after finding a ‘Dear John’ letter. She disappeared abroad and he died in a private mental home. Gwenda went to live with relatives in New Zealand.

One resident of the nursing home is an old woman who asks Gwenda ‘is it your poor child?’ The Reader doesn’t seriously imagine she’s the same woman in By the Pricking of My Thumbs, but it’s vaguely possible. Major Halliday killed himself with sleeping pills. He had suffered from hallucinations and datura is mentioned (i.e. inducing hallucinations in one’s spouse). His journal indicates suspicions of Helen’s fidelity.

Through chatting to elderly shop assistants, Miss Marple discovers all sorts of information about the past. The Reader supposes that this couldn’t possibly happen today. Giles infers an X who killed Helen and doped Halliday into thinking that he’d done it. Gwenda determines to discover who were the men in her life. Was it Walter Fane, whom she sailed to India to marry but whom she rejected and who settled as a bachelor solicitor in Dillmouth? Was it a boat romance that led her to reject Fane? She met Halliday on the return voyage.

Lily Kimble (neé Abbott), housemaid to the Hallidays, recalls the Fatal Night and her belief that Helen didn’t leave because the clothes ‘weren’t right.’ Colourless Walter Fane strikes Gwenda, to whom he once gave piggybanks, as a ‘house with the blinds down.’ Edith Pagett, cook to the Hallidays, was fond of Helen. The Hallidays had planned to move to Norfolk. Edith remembers that Lily (a) said a married man was ‘sweet’ on Helen; (b) overheard Helen saying “I’m afraid of you” to someone Edith knew couldn’t have been Halliday; (c) insisted that the clothes Helen was supposed to have taken made no sense (i.e. a man packed them at random).

Giles cons the Royal Clarence Hotel into showing him the Visitors’ Book from 18 years previously… and lo! the married man, Major Erskine. Mrs Fane is very helpful about Walter; such a quiet, sensitive boy, “a real home bird” who did however once attack his older brother with a poker. The Reeds somehow inveigle themselves into visiting the Erskines (near Hadrian’s Wall!) where the Major admits to Gwenda that he was the married man on the boat who couldn’t resist visiting Dillmouth; he stresses that no impropriety occurred. They parted platonically in Dillmouth and went their separate ways on what turned out to be the Fatal Night.

Dr Kennedy arrives with the letter from Helen and a handwriting sample for comparison, which he gives to Miss Marple who is helpfully looking after the garden for the Reeds. An ad. for Lily Abbott provokes her into writing to Dr Kennedy for advice. The ancient gardener remembers Helen’s septic foot and the wilful destruction of the Kennedys’ tennis net. Lily’s letter refers to a ‘posh car’ she ‘saw out of the window.’ A meeting with Lily is arranged.

Jackie Afflick took Helen out a few times despite Dr Kennedy’s disapproval. He was a solicitor’s clerk and insists that he was framed by Fane; he now successfully runs Coach Tours in Devon and Dorset. He tells Gwenda that he was sorry for Helen. Experts confirm the handwriting samples match, which – to Giles’ great surprise – pleases Miss Marple.

Lily Kimble (neé Abbott) is killed in a wood, the doctor’s letter found on her body. For some reason she ignored his directions, took an earlier train and alighted at the prior station. The police infer another rendezvous, possibly for purposes of blackmail. There is a very slight narrative deception, which probably doesn’t matter.

“I make it a rule,” Miss Marple observes, “to take nothing that is told to me as true” without external confirmation. There follows an excellent reiteration of the case against Fane, Afflick and Erskine; the first two were also invited to the Reeds’ that same afternoon, ostensibly by Giles but, think the Reeds, as an excuse by one of them to leave the office and kill Lily.

The police find Helen’s body under the steps. Mrs Cocker the cook is nearly killed by a sip of doctored brandy. Christie even flutters the thought that the culprit might be Mrs Erskine – improbably, given the distance from Hadrian’s Wall to Devon – before the Big Reveal. Left alone in the house, Gwenda is visited by Dr Kennedy, who shades his eyes and says “my eyes are dazzled” – at which point Gwenda remembers that he killed Helen. Miss Marple, needless to say, has ensured that Gwenda isn’t alone in the house.

Kennedy resented the attention paid to Helen. He induced hallucinations in Halliday and encouraged his delusions. He killed Helen and buried her during the night, having persuaded the Hallidays to construct new steps. Then he paid the Swiss nurse and sent her home, where she soon died of an overdose. The skill with which we are led to accept Kennedy’s account of the past is admirable; the dexterity with which clues are seeded within his account is breathtaking. This is clearly Christie working close to top form.

There is one minor flaw: Miss Marple refers to a mention in Lily’s letter to Kennedy of something that Leonie, the nurse, saw from the nursery window on the Fatal Night. In fact, she says that only to Mr Kimble (although it is reported second-hand that she told Edith Pagett). It probably makes no difference, but it’s regrettably noticeable.

That aside, Sleeping Murder is very good and a fitting final Miss Marple novel. In real-time chronology Nemesis would be the final novel – but not, however, Miss Marple’s final case…

‘He Was Asking After You’ is a very short, very neat story of Dornford, who keeps being told by friends that Fellowes ‘was asking after you.’ This alarms Dornford as he murdered Fellowes in Australia, yet the dead man seems to be getting closer…

‘Publicity’ finds Sir Geoffrey, middle-aged actor, engaged to young Lady Chloe – which is good publicity. Gyp Rains, young aviator, tells Sir Geoffrey that he’s eloping with Chloe. Geoffrey bolts from his performance during the second interval, taking a train for the east… but his suitcase, containing his stage clothing, is stolen. The thief is subsequently run over and killed; the newspapers print the death of the actor. Stuck in a provincial town, he recognises the leading lady in the theatre’s creaking melodrama, who presses him to step in when her leading man is indisposed. She in turn alerts the press and Sir Geoffrey declares he did it all for her – which is great publicity.

‘The Perfect Butler,’ in which the eponym politely refuses entrance to a ghost, is brilliant.

‘The Barbarian’ is Elfrida, out-of-time elemental Northern Queen who awaits a match. She found it in Vickers, only to be disappointed when he turned out to be weak, “pitifully blind and narrow.” She allows him to die of pneumonia as a sort of barbarian honour, which is slightly peculiar.

‘Mr Campion’s Lucky Day’ finds Oates with the corpse of Fane, shot at his desk. Campion’s interest in the day’s racing proves that the doctor did it. This is good fortune more than Campion’s brilliance, and only name recognition could explain this being the title story.

‘Tis Not Hereafter’ finds a young journalist setting out to find a ghost in a lonely house on an Essex marsh. She meets a young man en route, who declines to enter the house. She finds an old lady within, who was thought to have drowned tragically when young and who now likes to wander down in the afternoons and pretend to be a ghost. Her young lover, who thought she had drowned, did in fact shoot himself…

‘The Correspondents’ are Philip, vicar in rural Norfolk, and his epistolatory friend Robert, who tells him of a life of romance. Philip is summoned to Robert’s deathbed, where he finds that the latter rarely left his Wiltshire parish.

‘He Preferred Them Sad’ concerns Walter Cough, who sells cheap hymn-books to relations of the recently deceased. A Mr Parkinson turns up and orders fifty copies, to be delivered to a chapel… that turns out to be the chapel where Mr Parkinson had been buried two days before his visit.

‘The Unseen Door’ finds Oates with the corpse of Fenderson, killed in his Club. Merton, whom he exposed, ought to be guilty but Bowser the doorkeeper insists that nobody entered the Club. Campion demonstrates that Bowser is so blind, and so desperate to keep his job, that he recognises sounds. Merton impersonated an employee’s step.

‘Bird Thou Never Wert’ is narrated by the owner of what seems to be a haunted parrot-cage that’s replaying a murder… and then, by happenstance, the previous (and very alive) owners turn up at the flat. This pleasingly suggests a spectral parrot.

‘The Same to Us’ is the story of Mrs Molesworth, society hostess, conned by a Chinese thief.

‘She Heard it on the Radio’ is narrated by an art student who becomes friendly with a fellow lodger, lonely Miss Amber, whose chief delight in life is her radio. When she dies, the students discover her radio was a case with a brick inside… “she was the sanest, happiest little woman I ever knew, and what world she listened in to and derived her untarnishable delight from I do not dare to think.” It’s a lovely, quirky little piece.

‘The Man with the Sack’ sees Campion spending Christmas in a big house in the Essex saltings, invited by young Sheila Tarrett. Whilst Father Christmas is entertaining local children (apparently endemic in detective stories), a burglary occurs and the diamonds of ghastly Mrs Welkin stolen. Mike Peters, Sheila’s close friend and Father Christmas for the day, is suspected. Fortunately, Campion bumped into another Santa on leaving his room, having taken a break from the children, whom he recognised from the train as a thief-for-hire.

‘The Secret’ will come as no surprise to the reader. Geoff returns to Jenny and implores her to marry, but she can’t.

‘A Quarter of a Million’ is the longest story, one quarter of the whole book, and reads as though written for magazine serialisation. Inspector Parker splashily arrests Joseph Thurtle, crooked financier, at Victoria… but his ‘taxi’ is a third party who drives them out of sight. Parker’s body is found in Epping Forest. A piece of paper in his shoe leads to a garage used by a hotel for vistors’ cars, the proprietor of which is Thos. Knapp, occasional contact of Campion. Meanwhile, a friend of Inspector Fisher rents a remarkable flat, with hidden escape routes and a speaker in the chimney, into which a young woman is dumped and from which she promptly escapes. Fisher’s friend, Box, is actually a master crook overseeing the threats to Thurtle, or more precisely to Thurtle’s son who has just arrived in Southampton with £500k. “This is our last job,” says Box in an attempt to heighten the tension. They use underground Post Office tunnels to break into a department store, where Box sees Fisher and the girl from the flat, an employee of said store. He uses smoke bombs to make his escape and put the screws on Rupert Thurtle before retiring to the flat, where he condescends to Fisher. He makes his final getaway through Knapp’s inspection pit – Knapp, who was a rogue in the Campion stories, seems to have fallen in with bad company – but his chauffeur turned out to be Fisher, who realised that Box was in possession of the flat by the cigarette stubs. Phew.

‘The Pioneers’ is a charmingly touching story in which a visit from the Perneys restores the Barings’ marriage.

‘The Sexton’s Wife’ tells the narrator of her unhappy marriage to a ‘resurrection man’ and his untimely death at the hands of her first love, whose death he caused. Written as though by Poe in one of his happier moments.

‘The Wink’ has a great twist, which seems to be unjustified by the story of Mr Justice Fordred and his rare encounters with the devil.

It is good that these stories were collected and published, although the quality is remarkably variable. Campion isn’t at his best. ‘Publicity,’ ‘He Preferred Them Sad’, ‘She Heard it on the Radio’ and ‘The Pioneers’ are distinctly Allingham and worth the purchase price, if you happen to see a second-hand copy.

Black as he’s Painted (1974) states, on the back cover, that “a small black cat named Lucy Lockett out-detects them both.” This is outrageously misleading. The Reader has previously wondered why whoever writes blurbs hasn’t bothered to read the actual book.

The cat, which is indeed small and black, meets Samuel Whipplestone, recently retired from the Foreign Office, who on the same walk meets the large and black Ambassador of Ng’ombwana, a lately independent African republic. Driven by a mad impulse, Whipplestone purchases No. 1 Capricorn Walk. He retains Mr & Mrs Chubb, who ‘look after’ the property.

Alleyn is sent to Ng’ombwana to smooth the forthcoming visit of the President, with whom he was at school. The President is never given his name in the book; he is known throughout as ‘The Boomer.’ He was the first Ng’ombwanan to qualify as a barrister.

The cat invites itself to stay with Whipplestone and he names it Lucy Lockett. (Thus far the blurb is accurate). Sheridan, the former owner of No. 1 who resides in the basement as a condition of sale, is odd. The Sanskrits are enormous potters at the end of cul-de-sac Capricorn Mews; Kenneth Sanskrit is a crook kicked out of Ng’ombwana whom Alleyn saw during his visit.

Lucy keeps stealing a small porcelain fish from the basement, where Sheridan hosts some dubious neighbours, including Colonel Cockburn-Montfort, who organised the Ng’ombwanan Army and is now a confirmed lush married to a confirmed lushess (or possibly lushette).

An excellent reception at the Ng’ombwanan Embassy is spoiled during festivities in the garden when a shot is fired and the Ambassador speared in the back. Mrs C-M claims to have been shoved out of the ladies’ loo by a black man who took a shot through the louvred windows. Alleyn quotes from The Tempest. The idea seems to be that the shot created a diversion, and the spotlit Ambassador killed in mistake for the President. The spear-carrier claims that he was hit on the neck and deprived of his spear.

The President addresses the Ng’ombwanans. Whipplestone translates for Alleyn’s benefit. A Luger is found in the garden pool, presumed to have been cast from the loos. Chubb, hired for the occasion by the fancy caterer, is a blatant racist and a former commando. He claims that a black waiter put him in a headlock to facilitate the spearing. The wife of a Ng’ombwanan Plenipotentiary, who otherwise plays no part in the plot, says that the Ambassador’s final word was ‘traitor.’

The President asserts that neither the waiter nor spear-carrier is guilty. Whipplestone thinks he’s concealing something. Alleyn declares that Mrs C-M fired the shot and invented the gunman. Lucy abstracts a small porcelain fish from the Chubbs’ flat, which Chubb claims is the insignia of an ‘ESP Society.’ Alleyn buys a pottery pig from Miss Sanskrit and then calls on the C-Ms, who try to warn her. The Reader regrets the loss of the telephone extension, so crucial for so many stories and used here by Alleyn. He hears Miss Sanskrit not tell the C-Ms that Alleyn had already visited.

Glenys Chubb was killed in May 1969. The chief suspect, never arrested, was believed to be Ng’ombwanan…

The President invites himself to the Alleyns’ house so that Troy can paint his portrait. Whipplestone remarks that he saw Sheridan, then called Manuel Gomez, when he was prosecuted in a Ng’ombwanan court by the barrister who would become the President. Mr Sanskrit delivers an envelope to the Embassy just after midnight and seems to be preparing to leave the district. Alleyn concludes that a nest of conspirators is at work, but that Sanskrit was an informer for the President.

Alleyn quotes from Dream and then tells Mrs Chubb that Chubb was intended to kill the President but was prevented from doing so. Along with Fox, he enters the pottery to find both Sanskrits dead, killed by a large ceramic pig. The Embassy delivers their validated passports, expressly processed after he delivered them in an envelope just after midnight. Clearly they were planning to return to Ng’ombwana. The conspiracy was led by the late Ambassador, who would assume power after the murder of the President.

The waiter prevented Chubb from disabling the spear-carrier, who then killed the Ambassador, a case Alleyn calls “possibly the most outlandish in his professional career.” The surviving conspirators are disgusted and pleased when confronted with the corpses of the Sanskrits, but the murderer is revealed only when Mrs C-M drunkenly barges in and more or less accuses the Colonel of ‘doing what he said he would.’ He wanted revenge on the President for removing him after he had organised the Ng’ombwanan Army.

After a hasty second sitting with Troy, the President bids farewell to Alleyn and, although not stated directly, it is clear that the President himself ordered the assassination of the Ambassador. The Reader still thinks that swanning off to a private house to have a portrait painted just after you ostensibly survived an assassination attempt is a little high-handed, even for a dictator educated at a British public school.

It’s worth remembering that Marsh was born in 1895 and was therefore nearly 80 when she wrote Black as he’s Painted, one of the freshest and most entertaining Alleyn novels for a while. It’s far-fetched but at least it’s distinct and, from the perspective of 2026, her treatment of the ‘colour question’ is refreshingly sane and common-sensical. It’s always a pleasure to meet a realistic cat with personality and Lucy is a delight, even if she didn’t actually solve the case nor, as per the ridiculous thumbnail, play with a ball of red wool.

The title story finds Mellilow saying goodbye to Creech after their weekly game of chess, even though Creech has sold the Valley to the Electrical Company and thus condemned Mellilow’s lovely cottage to Development. Mellilow has an upsetting dream of being chased by two towers and finding a dead crow in the Folly.

The following Wednesday, a random commercial traveller called Moses appears at 8pm for a game of chess. A very good player, who plays in a glove because he has cut his hand, he leaves around 10. Creech’s appointment obviously kept him away… so thinks Mellilow, until he goes for a walk to clear his head and finds Creech dead in the Folly, along with his – Mellilow’s – galoshes and a white rook.

Mellilow appears doomed. He cannot prove Moses and Creech died after 9pm, with excellent prints of galoshes leading to the Folly. He is also missing a white rook. Wimsey, who for no explained reason is accompanying the Superintendent, observes that Mellilow’s walk clears him as the murderer would otherwise have returned his galoshes. There are three sets of prints, proving that the murderer never returned before Mellilow’s walk. Wimsey deduces that Moses was an enemy of Creech and accomplice of the murderer. It’s all very neat and pleasing.

‘The Haunted Policeman’ takes us to the birth of Peter’s son! Placing the action about nine months after the end of Busman’s Honeymoon.

After Harriet is successfully delivered, Peter is sent out of the way and drags in a passing off-duty policeman for 3 a.m. champagne. (It was a home birth, obviously). PC Burt, on duty in Merriman’s End cul-de-sac, accosted a man in a muffler, suspected vagrant. He then heard noises and looked through the letterbox of No. 13. He gives Wimsey a very detailed description of the hall, including a dead man in evening dress stabbed through the throat. A police colleague, summoned by whistle, pointed out that there is no 13 in Merriman’s End.

The ‘man with the muffler’ ran from Burt but was at least seen by a maid at No. 10. He has other reason to doubt his senses, however, as the construction of the houses means that he could not have seen rooms on both sides of the hall. Wimsey approves Burt’s excellent memory for smell as well as sight: pot-pourri at 10, beeswax and turpentine at 12, exotic ‘incense’ at 14.

Wimsey dresses very Bohemian and calls upon the ‘young master’ at No. 12, O’Halloran… who arranged it all as a glorious trompe l’oeil to convince his uncle, a Royal Academician, that he can actually draw. He was the ‘man in the muffler’ who bolted whilst his father rolled up the canvas and removed the number 13 from the porch fanlight. This is characteristic Sayers.

‘Talboys’ is, lest we forget, the name of the Wimseys’ house in Hertfordshire. Bredon, the heir, is now six years old. He admits to taking the peaches of neighbours Mr Puffett, not because he’s a prig but because Puffett saw him. Peter seems to hold a sound penology: Bredon’s punishment is explained, immediate, and forgotten. Miss Quirk, a distant relation who has been wished upon them, disagrees (“one must reason with these little people”). Bredon took only two, yet overnight all of Puffet’s peaches are snaffled. Miss Quirk saw Bredon and another boy carrying a basket at 5 a.m.

Examination of footprints in the soil proves Bredon’s version of events. Wimsey gives Puffet “a fine exposition of detective work in the traditional manner,” leading to the deduction that two men propped a ladder on the other side of the wall and harvested the peaches from on high.

Bredon has a secret in the furnace-room that he fears Peter may feel obliged to stop. It turns out to be a grass snake, which Peter doesn’t feel obliged to stop. Bredon’s crony Joey Maggs used a fishing net to catch a snake, but someone has hidden his net; this indicates to Peter that Joey’s father, a rival of Puffet at the flower show, used the net to steal the peaches.

Putting Cuthbert the Grass-Snake in Miss Quirk’s bed is perhaps ethically dubious, although it achieves the authors’ desired outcome of making her revert to nature and smack Bredon (not very effectively, he says). Perhaps it’s always worth revisiting the ethics of an earlier time. When Peter explains himself on the grounds that “repression is always so dangerous,” we know that he (and Sayers) is winking at the audience.

These aren’t classic Wimsey but any Wimsey is better than no Wimsey. Jill Paton Walsh’s A Presumption of Death is very loosely based on wartime pieces in the Spectator; The Attenbury Emeralds is her original novel based on a case to which Wimsey occasionally refers; The Late Scholar is original. All are worth reading, although we’re not going to look at them here. Walsh’s voice is increasingly present, which is not that of Sayers.

Readers may be interested to know that Viscount St George, Peter’s nephew, was killed in WWII and thus Peter became heir to the Dukedom of Denver. Presumably by this point Bredon is the Duke or, as he would be pushing 90, his descendants or those of his brothers.

Postern of Fate (1973) was the last original novel Christie wrote, alas.

Tommy and Tuppence Beresford have moved to a new house. We know they (or the author) are ageing as Tuppence tells Tommy things he must already know – later in the narrative she actually says “Betty, our adopted daughter,” as though he needed reminding. He’s not that old.

Tuppence finds a code in The Black Arrow, owned by Alexander Parkinson, a schoolboy of some decades previously. Underlined letters spell out ‘Mary Jordan did not die naturaly’ [sic]. There is no Mary Jordan in the cemetery, but Tommy (and Hannibal, their Manchester Terrier) discover Alexander’s grave. He died aged 14.

Ancient Mrs Griffin remembers the ‘trouble’ with Mary Jordan, around the Great War, and Alexander’s suspicions. A local girl helpfully passes on her granny’s gossip: Mary was a German spy who died when foxglove leaves were mixed with spinach (yes, the exact method in ‘The Herb of Death’ from The Thirteen Problems). Mary went to London once each week and may have been a spy, possibly a thief…

Isaac, ancient gardener, opens ‘KK’ the greenhouse / dumping ground in which they find Matilde the rocking-horse and Truelove the child’s cart for racing downhill. Colonel Atkinson, an old chum of Tommy, remembers that ‘The Laurels’ (then Swallow’s Nest) was suspected of harbouring a cache of evidence that pointed towards a traitor. KK also holds two porcelain stools with figures of swans curled around them, one stool in light blue and one in dark.

Tommy seems to think that The Secret Adversary was “at least sixty or seventy years ago,” which suggests that he really is losing it. There is more elderly rambling and then Tommy is introduced to Mr Robinson! Last seen in Passenger to Frankfurt¸ the ‘fat, yellow’ man who knows everything about money. He also somehow knows the entire plot of N or M?

Mr Robinson tells Tommy that Mary Jordan “was one of our lot.” Tommy and Tuppence theorise several means of despatch drawn from the works of Agatha Christie, although obviously they don’t know that. Tuppence also thinks that someone loosened the wheels of Truelove to cause a crash. Mrs Griffin, 94yo, remembers the late Alexander Parkinson. Other old folk at the Pensioners’ Club vaguely recall various random snippets, to no obvious effect. Somebody mentions Oxford and Cambridge, which Tuppence somehow fails to recall she has already discovered.

A mysterious ancient message changing the location of a rendez-vous is found in Matilde. Colonel Pikeaway, also last seen in Passenger to Frankfurt, remembers the house as “a headquarters for what I should call evil.” The area was the haven for Jonathan Kane, proto-fascist, whose influence has never quite died. Isaac is coshed and killed. His descendant Henry, who is 12 or 13, also somehow seems to know all about N or M?

Henry and a group of his friends come to see Tuppence, for no obviously good reason. She goes to the Pensioners’ Palace Club, where more maundering geriatrics seem to know – or ‘know’ – something about the Mary Jordan case. In another old book, she then finds a note reading ‘grin hen lo’ and realises it means Lohengrin, i.e. a swan, i.e. the Oxford and Cambridge porcelain stools. They find a tarpaulin package within Cambridge. Tuppence is shot and Pikeaway knows everything.

Miss Iris Mullins arrives to offer help with the garden. Hannibal is unimpressed. Mr ‘Angus Crispin’ also offers to help with the garden, having previously worked for Mr Solomon. Tommy has the census data from (presumably) 1911, which tells them who was in the house (on one specific date, which seems an extraordinarily thin basis for a murder inquiry).

Miss Mullins visits Tuppence, who is resting in bed, and breaks a vase… and slips something into Tuppence’s coffee. Tommy and ‘Mr Crispin,’ who turns out to be Horsham from Passenger to Frankfurt, have everything under control. Miss Mullins is a bad lot.

Deborah their daughter arrives for a family visit. She is ‘nearly forty,’ which places her birth around 1933 and thus makes nonsense of N or M? But Christie never figured out the Tommy and Tuppence chronology.

Oh, and the local doctor killed Mary Jordan, presumably under instruction. And Iris Mullins, aka Dodo, is presumably a revenant fascist. At this point it’s difficult to care. “’You’d be surprised,’ said Tommy, ‘what people will read – and enjoy!’” How very true.

It would be lovely to say that Postern of Fate was a fitting farewell; lovely, but impossible. It’s a meandering tale with loose threads all over the place and, in short, a sad disappointment.

Had Christie survived and retained her mental acuity, we might have been treated to a Pikeaway & Robinson series. Far better that a contemporary author should write those instead of the misbegotten Poirot and Marple reboots.

In 1974 was published Poirot’s Early Cases, which we covered on 20 December 2024. Fortunately, although Postern of Fate would be the last original novel Christie wrote, it would not be the last original novel published…

Further arrivals on Christmas Eve: Hilary’s aloof fiancée, Cressida Tottenham, and his original business mentor, ‘Uncle’ Bert Smith. A booby-trap on the library door hits Troy with her own turpentine can, the same method by which Mervyn (household) committed his manslaughter. A note was left under Cressida’s door, fulminating against SINFUL WOMAN and UNCHASTE LADY and so on. This indicates Nigel (household). The Colonel also gets a note, accusing B of cuckoldry. Soap is put in Bert’s barley water.

Hilary and Troy trim the tree in gold. Cressida has been the Colonel’s responsibility since her father, a fellow in the regiment, saved the Colonel’s life. Nigel sculpts a replica tomb-effigy from snow in the courtyard, which stands on a large packing-case. The Colonel is to play a sort of Druidic Santa, entering from outside to distribute presents to the local children. Moult, the Colonel’s long-serving ‘man,’ is violently disliked by Hilary’s household.

Only after the successful appearance of Druid Santa, albeit wearing knitted gloves, is it revealed that the Colonel had one of his ‘turns’ and was replaced by Moult, who thereafter disappeared.

An attempt is made on the Forresters’ strong-box. Alleyn, who has just returned from Australia, calls Troy from London and is promptly invited to Halberds. Hilary finds a poker, presumed to have been use don the strong-box, in the branches of a fir tree in the courtyard. Alleyn and the local police find dampness in the Druidic cloak and wig, as though cleaned of some stain and replaced in the downstairs cloakroom where they belong. Not the first time Overture to Death, Dead Water), the local police are understaffed and busy, thus bouncing Alleyn into leading the investigation.

Alleyn finds Nigel in the Forresters’ bedroom, having leaned out of the window for no obvious reason. He is emotionally afflicted by a sense of sin. Alleyn has ideas, which defeat The Reader as they require awareness of 3D space and of Halberds’ topography.

The Colonel saw Moult at 7.30 p.m. precisely, having registered his cue from the courtyard to go downstairs, don the outfit, have his golden Druidic beard affixed and do his stuff. Moult “smelt most awfully strong of whisky.” The Colonel has another nasty turn. Alleyn finds the windows are wedged shut and suspects the Colonel over-exerted himself in attempting to open them.

The staff are understandably truculent. Vincent confirms removing decorations from the tree and dumping it in the courtyard. He does this shiftily even though it was his job. They’re inclined to call Moult a tippler and blame him for attempting to frame them. Sniffer dogs prove that Moult left and returned to the cloakroom in fur-lined boots. The weather is extremely bad, which hampers the search. Alleyn climbs the fir tree, rather unwisely given the weather, to retrieve a slender strip of metallic gold, probably from the Druidic robe. “People,” Alleyn murmurs, “can be amazingly contradictory.” This is true, although not often in detective novels.

Bert was fond of Moult; at least, fond of Moult’s devotion to the Colonel. He approved of Cressida, whom he thinks is not as bad as she seems. Alleyn’s left arm is badly bruised by a big green porcelain vase falling on it. This is swiftly followed by Cressida screaming; she greatly dislikes cats and reacted very badly to finding the kitchen cats in her room. “Alleyn was briefly reminded of the arousing of the guests at Forres,” which is sufficiently close to qualify as the statutory Macbeth quote.

Troy attests that there were no tracks on the show; ergo, Moult (alive or dead) remains within the bounds. Alleyn keeps watch at the library window and, in the early hours, three of the household come to the snow effigy with a large sledge, intending to remove the packing-case. Alleyn prevents them and opens the case to find Moult’s corpse.

Fox, Bailey and Thompson, who appear to have made no career moves in 38 years, arrive. Vincent found the body when dumping the Christmas tree and the household, excepting emotional Nigel, stored it in the case for future disposal. One of them uses the word ‘crap,’ which The Reader never expected from Marsh. Clearly Christie’s ‘arseing about’ had an effect.

Moult, it turns out, was hit by a poker and then tipped out of the window, whereupon his neck broke. The Colonel identities the body of the man who gave twenty-five years excellent service, 1946-71 (which means, following internal chronology, that Alleyn must be well over seventy). Hilary, Bert and Aunt B have a ‘meeting.’ Cressida leaves them to go to Colonel…

…although in fact she is caught by Alleyn rifling the Colonel’s tin box. On her first attempt, she was surprised by Moult, whom she killed after he told her that he was her father. And then she played Druid Santa in his stead. Fearing Hilary’s reaction to the truth about her lowly parentage (her mother was a German who died in childbirth), she wanted to destroy the evidence.

The murder and its justification are weak, quite apart from the fact that it’s shoved into the narrative rather late. Alleyn – who must surely have been a bit tired? – again solves the crime within a few hours and the whole thing feels slightly over-strained, as though a long short story had been extended on the publishers’ insistence.

Elephants Can Remember (1972) was the last Poirot novel Christie wrote.

Mrs Oliver attends a literary luncheon and is accosted by a Mrs Burton-Cox, whose son Desmond wishes to marry Celia, one of Ariadne’s godchildren. She really wants to know of Celia’s mother killed her father or vice versa. Ariadne tells Poirot, whose English has become noticeably more idiomatic. There was a time when he never used contractions. The Ravenscroft deaths occurred twelve years previously, in Cornwall. Celia was away at the time.

Celia comes to Ariadne for sherry. The Reader is astonished to hear of Mrs Oliver’s late husband, never previously mentioned. Ariadne knew Celia’s mother at school, which (following internal Christie chronology) must have been 1920 at the latest. General and Lady Ravenscroft were found shot dead on the clifftop, his revolver nearby.

Inspector Garroway (retired) could never understand why it happened as the Ravenscrofts were on good terms. The General was close on sixty, his wife was thirty-five. She would now be forty-seven had she lived, which means she was born in 1925… so Mrs Oliver was about eleven in Cards on the Table. The Reader remembers that Agatha Christie was very old (but still, didn’t Collins have an editor??)

‘Old sins have long shadows,’ suggesting the story of a dead child from Malaya might be relevant. Poirot recalls Five Little Pigs. Ariadne’s friend Julia Carstairs remembers the Ravenscrofts but has little to add beyond a memory that she had four wigs. Mrs Matcham, former nanny, remembers that Lady Ravenscroft, neé Molly Preston-Grey, had a sister who was slightly (as they used to say) touched. Mrs Buckle, who once ‘did for’ the Ravenscrofts, remembers the troublesome sister and a handsome tutor to Celia’s brother and a gardener with a dodgy past…

Ariadne observes that memories can be wrong yet also useful and based upon something. People vaguely recall that Mrs Ravenscroft had been in hospital, possibly with cancer and possibly with marital trouble of some kind. People vaguely recall that the dog was devoted to her yet also bit her. Mrs Burton-Cox is Desmond’s adoptive mother. He suggests Poirot talk to Maddy and Zélie, the Ravenscrofts’ au pair girls (aux pairs?) / French instructrices.

Garroway confirms that Dolly, Lady Ravenscroft’s twin sister, was suspected of killing a child who ‘accidentally drowned.’ Dolly had been staying with the Ravenscrofts but sleepwalked over a cliff three weeks prior to the murder/suicide. Mrs Burton-Cox runs away when Poirot shows signs of starting a proper investigation; “she was afraid of what questions I was going to ask her.”

Dr Willoughby’s father thought Dolly, then the widow Mrs Jarrow, deliberately drowned her son. General (as he then wasn’t) Ravenscroft was firstly attracted to Dolly before settling upon Molly. Mrs Rosentalle, once of Bond St, supplied additional wigs to a ‘French young lady’ on behalf of Lady Ravenscroft approximately four weeks before the murder/suicide.

Mr Goby, increasingly doing the legwork for Poirot (and indeed for the author), discovers that Desmond’s real mother became a pop star who died rich; for as long as he didn’t marry, Mrs Burton-Cox would be his next of kin. The dog bit Lady Ravenscroft not long before she died. Poirot visits the cemetery in which they all are buried, presumably in Cornwall, and is “sure now that I know what happened.” And then he goes to Switzerland, where he meets Maddy and Zélie. The latter displays remarkably precise knowledge of the details of the deaths (“impressions of both people, slightly smeared, were on [the revolver]”). Poirot, out of nowhere, tells her that she loved General Ravenscroft and she agrees.

Everyone gathers in Cornwall and Poirot explains that the dog “knew she was not its mistress.” Dolly had pushed Molly over the cliff and Molly, in an unusually long and coherent dying speech, implored the General not to allow Dolly into the hands of the police. The General and Zélie identified the corpse as Dolly and, with the help of wigs, passed off Dolly as Molly for three weeks before the General shot her and then himself.

This is actually quite a good plot, of which a younger Christie might have made a decent book. Unfortunately, this is a plodding narrative in which the relevant clues are laboriously planted rather than cleverly scattered as in the old days. Still, it may be underwhelming but it’s not that bad.

Come on, The Red Mill by Victor Herbert and Henry Blossom, which opened on Broadway in 1906 and was successfully revived in 1945?

Nope?

I have nothing against The Red Mill. I’m sure it’s a fine show. I mention it solely to make the point that Bloom & Vlastnik’s 101 Greatest is sufficiently thorough to reach back and include musicals that were extremely important and/or successful, but of which little remains. Good for them. However, The Red Mill – and Herbert’s slightly better-known 1903 hit, Babes in Toyland – will not make it into the Vestibule unless or until I see a real-life production.

Bloom & Vlastnik, whose book should be in every serious library, include some bonus material alongside the 101 Greatest. These include Great Scores from So-So Shows, of particular concern to those – i.e. most – of us who enjoy musicals through the medium of Spotify. Some of these shows are so So-So, if you follow, that they haven’t even made it onto Spotify. High among these is A Time for Singing, music by John Morris and lyrics by Gerald Freedman, which opened on Broadway in May 1966 and closed in June 1966.

The source material was very promising, Richard Llewellyn’s splendid novel How Green Was My Valley (and presumably also the film version, which has never been forgiven by film historians for beating Citizen Kane to the Best Picture Oscar). There hadn’t been enough Welsh choral singing on Broadway thitherto, a defect that A Time for Singing tried its best to rectify.

It certainly sounds wonderful, what there is you can find on YouTube. The not-in-fact-title song sounds like the sort of number written expressly for Gordon Macrae or Alfred Drake or John Raitt or (more improbably) John Cullum:

“When the mist of early morn kissed the golden corn / oh, How Green Was My Valley long ago”

It’s the Platonic ideal of a Sentimental Ballad, which I think most of us can live with. It was actually sung by Ivor Emmanuel, who had a terrific voice and was incidentally a friend of Richard Burton. (Burton, as we know, won a Tony for Camelot. I don’t think he could have survived A Time for Singing). It begins, apparently, on an upward-leaping ninth, “that most ambitious and least employed” – understandably – “of vocal intervals.”

Don’t, by the way, confuse it with ‘How Green Was My Valley’ by Vera Lynn. Different song.

It’s not difficult to hear Rodgers and Hammerstein in the score. Some of the choral work sounds like Carousel, even to the extent of hymning the quotidian (compare ‘That Was a Real Nice Clambake’ and ‘What a Good Day is Saturday’). Tessie O’Shea, who was also genuinely Welsh and had won a Tony for stopping cold Noel Coward’s The Girl Who Came to Supper, played the mother. The role of the matriarch in ostensibly patriarchal societies would repay more investigation.

Onstage, Ken Mandelbaum suggests, there were “too many principal characters” and the adaptation lost the brilliant narrative framing of the novel, in which everything is viewed from the slightly oblique perspective of the boy Huw. However, the score “was richer and more serious than that of most shows of the period… there was an operatic emotionalism about the show, and much of the music was lovely.” Ethan Mordden, never slow to criticise, calls it “one of the decade’s supreme achievements, a melodious, dramatic and thrilling Big Sing.”

It’s not a forgotten lyrical masterpiece, but “a stunning score with magnificent vocal arrangements” deserves a fate better than being ignored by Spotify and allmusicals.com. Indeed, it has been identified as a forerunner of through-sung musicals like Les Mis and Miss Saigon. You may cheer or mutter according to taste.

God bless the York Theatre, whoever they are.

A Time for Singing shared a choreographer with another of Bloom & Vlastnik’s Great Scores, a show that opened in 1964 and ran 568 performances. It was partly due to the star, Sammy Davis Jr (who really could sing), partly due to the Charles (music) Strouse & Lee (lyrics) Adams score, and partly due to the material, which began life as a Clifford Odets play. Mr Wonderful ran a year in 1956 as a vehicle for Davis, but this was a real musical.

Golden Boy includes one of my favourite forgotten gems, another one of those Broadway numbers (like ‘Everyone’s a Little Bit Racist’) that could replace weeks of earnest seminars. ‘Don’t Forget 127^th Street’ is the community’s appeal to boxer Joe (Sammy Davis) not to forget his roots:

“H is for the heroin they sell here,
A is for the alleys where kids play,
R is for the rats that run pell-mell here,
L is for the landlords far away.
E is for the endless clean-up projects,
M is for the moldy rooms above.
Put them all together, they spell Harlem,
The place that white folks think we love”

Will I miss it? asks Joe. Sure I will: “every chance I get!”

I lived for a few months very near 127^th & Seventh Avenue and this sort of thing never happened, alas.

“A fine score,” says Mordden, in which “the songs develop these difficult characters.” The lead’s establishing number, the ‘I Want’ song, is a fascinating ‘What-Do-I-Want’ song, written with a great deal of sensory reference (breeze, neon, laughter, burn) that evokes night-time in Harlem:

“As the night comes and the town awakes,
Sounds of children calling
And the squeal of brakes,
Music, but a lonely song,
When you can’t help wondering,
‘Where do I belong?’”

Beautiful, although it might help to imagine it as more dramatic and less of a lounge number.

‘Night Song’ gave Sammy to the audience and the show ran… and didn’t pay off due to some highly incompetent production. Oh yes, Golden Boy also presented the first major inter-racial romance in a Broadway musical. No Strings was first, but it was front and centre in Golden Boy.

It’s a show James Baldwin might have written if James Baldwin had a sense of humour. It’s a show Ta-Nehisi Coates might… no, it’s a show he could never have written. And yes, Strouse and Adams and librettist William Gibson were not [black / Black]; nor was George Gershwin, composer of Porgy and Bess.

Speaking of so-so shows that a sunnier James Baldwin might have written, a great score was Cabin in the Sky. Vernon Duke composed and the great John Latouche, 25 years old at the time, wrote the lyrics. And yet it’s another important show absent from allmusicals.com.

Duke was Russian-American, Latouche was from the north South and librettist Lynn Root [who? yes, precisely] from Minnesota. Maybe in this Year of Our Lord 2026 there are non-[black / Black] creatives writing for [black / Black] performers; and, if so, perhaps someone would be good enough to tell me. (Paging Clifton Duncan!)

The cast included the great Ethel Waters, Dooley (Casablanca) Wilson and the beautiful-of-form-and-voice Todd Duncan. Had she done nothing else, Waters would have made history by introducing Irving Berlin’s ‘Heat Wave’ and ‘Supper Time’ in As Thousands Cheer. In Cabin in the Sky, she introduced what became Latouche’s best-known lyrics: ‘Taking a Chance on Love.’ This was written the week before the official Broadway opening to a tune Duke pulled out of his Unused Material File, further evidence (see: ‘Send in the Clowns’) that spending years in workshop is usually a pointless exercise for a musical. Just write it, rehearse it and produce it and then you’ll see if it’s any good. And, if it isn’t, you have time to write another.

“Here I go again
I hear those trumpets blow again
All aglow again
Taking a chance on love”

I like rhyming on the ante-penultimate syllable. Yes, it sounds like ‘Bewitched, Bothered, Bewildered’, but here’s a very Latouche touch:

“I thought that cards were a frame-up
I never would try
Now I’m taking that game up
And the ace of hearts is high”

(Constructing a metaphor from a reality is excellent writing. In the show, the character does indeed play cards).

And again:

“I walk around with a horseshoe
In clover I lie
And brother rabbit of course you
Better kiss your foot goodbye”

The only lyrical blip is “I see a rainbow blending now,” which is an oddly clunky image for Latouche. Still, it’s better than Ted Fetter’s original lyrics. (No, nor had I).

The 1943 film version also included new songs by Harold Arlen and Yip Harburg.

A slightly random dance break, but there you are.

The hymn to ‘Savanna’ (in preference to Havana, this being 1940 when Havana was an attractive destination for normal people) has the Latouche touch:

“Savanna / you are sweeter than songs of Spain / when you’re dancing your snappy tango / the Georgia gang go- / es insane”

Cabin in the Sky is a folk parable with an eternal dimension; the soul of Joe, a weak man, could go to Heaven (Todd Duncan) or to Hell (Rex Ingram). It’s a story, which is still quite novel for a Broadway musical in 1940. “The score, like the book, abjures anything typical of Broadway;” and anything provoking the verb abjure must be doing something right. Critics enjoyed it, yet it ran only 156 performances. There isn’t an Original Cast Recording – they were few and far between in 1940 – but there is a cast recording on Spotify. No Waters nor Duncan, alas, but better than nothing.

Bloom & Vlastnik include Marc Blitzstein’s magnificent score for Juno and Jerry Herman’s Mack and Mabel, “another of those misleading cast recordings that cause the listener to believe”, as Ken Mandelbaum notes, “that the show must have been wonderful.” Apparently not; but we’ve looked at Jerry Herman before, so we’ll move on.

But not without my favourite Mack and Mabel clip!

I don’t know why it sounds so good in a German accent, but it does.

This month’s final great score from a so-so show is Rags, lyrics by the very inconsistent Stephen Schwartz and music by – him again! – Charles Strouse.

Rags has its partisans and detractors, note B & V, “but all agree that the score is heavenly.” Its Broadway run was diabolical, Rags clocking up a mere four performances in 1986. It’s about Jewish-Russian immigration to New York in 1910, which is a rich source of material – especially in NYC, you’d have thought – but utterly failed to find an audience. (The librettist, Joseph Stein, had written Fiddler on the Roof, to which Rags was not a sequel. Perhaps it should have been).

It did, however, include one of the best lines heard on Broadway in the entire decade, in a song for Tammany Hall fixers, which several people obviously heard and took as a policy document:

“foreign types ain’t no dilemma / if you get ‘em voting Demma- / crat / what’s wrong with that?”

It also has one of the most beautiful songs of the decade, ‘Children of the Wind,’ sung by Rebecca (the lead) on arrival, with her son David, in New York:

“Sleeping under haystacks
Eating roots where they grow
Begging on the pier at Danzig
Well, we made it here from Danzig
What’s another mile or so?”

That’s not funny, exactly, but shot through with such wry resilience that you want to cheer for Rebecca for those lines alone.

“We’re children of the wind
Blown across the earth
Pieces of a heart
Scattered worlds apart
So far from those we love
All the children
Of the wind”

It’s probably over-analysing to observe that the presence of only one rhyme suggests the unmoored life of the eponymous children, but I mention it nevertheless. (Granted, there’s also a half-rhyme on love/of).

There is a grainy archive clip of Teresa Stratas, the original Rebecca, which offers some hint of her magnetic performance.

The title song is a cry against the mirage of the New World, which promised much and delivered:

“Here’s where the beauty is
Where the party is
See that handsome gent
Look how smart he is
Dancing by in his fancy clothes
And he sneers at me down his perfect nose
And his hair is clean and his skin is clear
And he wonders “what is she doing here?”
And he turns his back and the rest do too
And I want to scream “I’m the same as you!”
But it isn’t true, I’m just
One more Jew
In her rags”

This was the milieu from which the Gershwins and Irving Berlin sprang, which isn’t intended to dismiss the plaint of the song but to underpin Mandelbaum’s point that the show was relentlessly dark. It needed a bit of light and shade.

Rags doesn’t have a great set of lyrics; it sounds better than it reads, which I always think is a bit of a problem with musicals. Perhaps Rags as written would have been better as an opera. Even so it was nominated for the Best Musical Tony Award; the other three nominees were Les Mis, Me and My Girl and Starlight Express, which suggests that Rags was the best American musical of the 1986-7 season by default. A hypothetical Broadway season that saw revivals of Rags, Golden Boy, A Time for Singing and Cabin in the Sky would be a very special season indeed.

Mr Matthews, regular guest, dies at Drover’s Arms, slightly too swanky pub-hotel in Great Burdon, Oxfordshire. Young Miss Peregrine sweeps in and deals with it. Bulky Charles Porteous reveals to her a secret compartment in Matthews’ briefcase that is missing – he says - £1250. Campion is apparently 60, which indicates that Carter has forgotten or chosen to ignore his late wife’s chronology.

Corkran, his friend from the Service, now works for Omega the oil people, which has lost a genius geologist called Francis Makepeace. The contents of his flat include a Diocletian coin, which may indicate a link to a Roman ship newly unearthed in the grounds of Brett School in Suffolk, of which Miss Peregrine’s father is Headmaster. Matthews had planned to move close to the ship, in the vicinity of which the manager of the Drover’s Arms has recently drowned.

In terms of setting up the plot, this is an excellent opening.

Anthea Peregrine is helping organise the dig, with the assistance of a handsome Cambridge-bound 19yo. The local Superintendent confirms to Campion that Matthews’ car was driven down, presumably by the late manager, and pushed over a cliff. Porteous, two henchmen and a dog kidnap Anthea from Coastguards, a nearby cottage. He seems to want her inheritance from Matthews.

Campion is scoping out the police investigation of ransacked Coastguards when he encounters the young man, who turns out to be R.O. Smith, the owner of a penknife also found in Makepeace’s flat. Smith breaks into the dark-room of the school whilst Campion, in a coal-hole, accosts Ginger Scott, the man who has been following him (not very well) and learns he has been paid by a fellow old lag, Wilkie Collins. The Reader doesn’t believe that to be his real name.

Snapshots from the dig, abstracted by Smith, suggest Matthews is Makepeace. Monitoring the short-wave messages to Scott leads Campion to the Stone of Burdon. C9 is an excellent conversation on Burdon Hill between Campion and Porteous, who seems to have been impeded in some way by Matthews. Over dinner, Campion and Lampeter, the Corkran-provided guard, swap info on Makepeace. Anthea, Smith and antique dealer Morris Jay converge on Great Burdon. Campion, from a distance, observe Anthea and Smith abandon her blue Renault in an attempt to shake a pursuant Mercedes.

Lampeter, gathering information about the Worth Brothers, ostensible watch-repairers, is doped in a Wine Lodge. The corpse, slightly out of the blue, is revealed to be neither Matthews (d. 1960) nor Makepeace but one McArdie, an ex-employee of Omega. Porteous is unknown to Lampeter but certainly suspected by Corkran of industrial espionage. Morris Jay invites Campion for a drink and is assailed en route; they seem to have little in common. The Reader is a tiny bit confused.

Anthea retrieves something from a private bank, on Makepeace’s instructions, then she and Smith retrieve the Renault. Pooling of information suggests a lead to a supposedly failed exploration site off the East African coast.

Makepeace, issuing an invitation in Porteous’ name, dines with Campion; he wants only to be left alone. Porteous himself, sitting upstairs, gives Makepeace an ultimatum, framed as a business transaction with implied threat. Campion somehow deduces that Makepeace discovered diamonds in the few months when he was out of contract with Omega.

Anthea, who has been abducted and released, turns up in Campion’s (temporary) flat wanting only the return of Smith. He encourages a ‘surrender’ to Porteous but Makepeace will have nothing to do with it.

Back at The Drover’s, an attempt to hand over to Porteous an immense diamond, supplied to Campion by Morris Jay, is spoiled by Collins, a Porteous hire, who holds the group at gunpoint and absconds with the jewel. Campion, in another extraordinary leap of logic, takes Anthea to the Alsatian kennels in Kent, a former army barracks, run by Collins’ younger brother. There they find some Alsatians, whom Campion disarms by feeding, and also Smith.

Returning to Brett, Campion finds Makepeace in a shed destroying amphorae, one of which contains the real diamond. Collins got away with an enormous rock crystal. Anthea and Smith are a couple.

Although a certain amount of confusion is fine in a thriller / spy novel, Falcon and Farthing have a slightly random element that mars both without ruining either. High marks to Philip Youngman Carter; not quite top-notch Allingham but a worthwhile contribution.

Nemesis (1971) finds Miss Marple reading The Times, where she notices the death of Jason Rafiel (from A Caribbean Mystery). A passer-by, who introduces herself as Miss Bartlett, exchanges words with her on gardens. She receives a letter from solicitors Broadribb & Schuster, who present a vague proposition from Mr Rafiel worth £20k. He wants her to investigate a crime and there is no further direction. Their codeword seems to be Nemesis. Goddess of Retribution. He quotes the prophet Amos: ‘let justice roll down like waters / And righteousness like an everlasting stream.’

Miss Marple begins with Esther Anderson, previously Walters, who is doing well but is of no obvious help. A further posthumous note from Mr Rafiel sends her on Homes and Gardens Tour 37, with 15 other passengers who are more or less worthy of suspicion. (The Reader pauses to note the ambiguity of the word ‘suspicious’). Otherwise, she is in the dark.

Miss Marple thinks she’s seen Miss Cooke before, when her hair wasn’t yellow. She meets Elizabeth Temple, revered former Headmistress of Fallowfield School, who she identifies as a ‘pilgrim.’ Miss Marple is told of a former pupil who didn’t marry Mr Rafiel’s son because she died, of love, “one of the most frightening words there is in the world.”

Miss Marple realises that Miss Cooke is Miss Bartlett! Lavinia Glynne invites her to stay, on Mr Rafiel’s suggestion, at the Old Manor House for a couple of days. Miss Marple is reminded of the Three Sisters: Clotilde is a handsome Clytemnestra type, Anthea is strange, the House (c.1780) is dilapidated and impregnated with sorrow. She considers the witches in Macbeth. The Reader is convinced somebody has had this idea before, possibly in The Pale Horse.

Anthea is very sad at the loss of the garden and the greenhouse. The elderly ‘help,’ former housemaid, is more explicit about the murder of Clotilde’s ward by Michael Rafiel. Lavinia, the only widow of the three, is worried about Anthea mooning over the garden and about Clotilde’s relative harshness.

Emlyn Price, young man on the tour, arrives with bad news: on the previous day’s walk, Elizabeth Temple was hit by a boulder that rolled down a hill. She is unconscious in hospital. Professor Wanstead, older man on the tour, reveals that Mr Rafiel appointed him to ‘keep an eye’ on Miss Marple. Wanstead specialises in criminal psychology. Miss Marple is slightly resentful, even a little snippy, about being in the dark (“for goodness’ sake, tell me something”).

Michael Rafiel was a bad lot eventually arraigned for murder. “I do not like evil beings who do evil things,” Miss Marple agrees. The Governor of the Institution where Michael was sent felt that he was a criminal type but not a murderer. Jason Rafiel was clear-sighted about his son but also about Justice; he charged Wanstead with setting Miss Marple, whom he believed “had a very fine sense of evil,” to investigate – but with no presumptions, a mark of his essential justice.

This is clearly shaping up as a most unusual Christie, in which the plot itself is the mystery. That’s more of a thriller trope, although this definitely isn’t a thriller; it’s slow, considered and rather creepy. Something is terribly wrong, but what?

Miss Marple posits another man besides Michael. Andrea conjures an ageing Ophelia. Joanna and Emlyn, the young people on the tour, told Wanstead of a person in a loud checked jumper rolling the boulder that hit Miss Temple. Two girls disappeared around the same time: Michael’s lover and ‘a girl called Nora Broad.’ With her dying words, Miss Temple asks Miss Marple to “find out about Verity.” She vows to do so, “with God’s help.”

Broadribb & Schuster recall that Verity Hunt had been a pupil of Miss Temple. Miss Marple drops her name into conversation at the Manor House and Clotilde is very upset. Lavinia tells Miss Marple the story of Verity, whose parents died and who was taken under Clotilde’s wing. Clotilde had to identify Verity’s disfigured corpse. Miss Merrypit at the local shop is very informative regarding the local girls and Miss Marple then deceives the Post Office regarding the destination of a parcel she saw carried by Anthea.

Emlyn is red-green colour-blind. The Reader regretfully thinks that the murder of Miss Temple – on an open hilltop! – is sadly implausible. Miss Marple learns more from locals about Nora, who disappeared and is presumed to be with a man (if not several). Nobody has told her who to ask, but The Reader puts it down to Narrative Assumption.

Archdeacon Brabazon, whom Miss Temple had intended to visit, comes to see Miss Marple. He had agreed to marry Michael and Verity because they were in love and she was fully aware of his character; it was, he says, a ‘necessary marriage.’ He muses that she also wanted to escape Clotilde. They didn’t turn up and to be married and he doesn’t know why. Against his will, he was forced to believe that Michael killed her.

Miss Marple sends Wanstead to London to make enquiries. She will remain to face the ‘atmosphere of evil.’ Clotilde and Lavinia are afraid of Anthea. Clotilde is very upset when talking of Verity, whom she loved; and Michael, whom she didn’t. Miss Cooke and Miss Barrow appear at the Manor House, looking for Miss Marple. She suggests that Joanna and Emlyn might have done it.

“I think hate would die out,” she muses. “It’s not as strong a force as love.” Miss Cooke suggests that Miss Marple not drink her evening coffee. She and Miss Barrow leave, very incompetently. “Those two don’t seem real,” says Lavinia. “I have wondered about them a great deal,” Miss Marple agrees. Clotilde gives her a glass of warm milk instead of her coffee.

At 3 a.m. Miss Marple is woken by Clotilde entering her room. “I have not drunk my milk,” she admits. “Not wholesome, you know.” This is because Clotilde was trying to kill her, having correctly suspected that Miss Marple knew the truth: Clotilde killed Verity to prevent her from marrying Michael and buried her in the garden. Later she killed Nora, disfigured her body and, when the corpse was eventually discovered, identified her as Verity. She was happy for Michael to take the blame and feared what Miss Temple may potentially learn from Archdeacon Brabazon.

C22 is possibly the longest explanation offered by any Christie detective ever. Miss Marple’s narrative goes on for pages and includes probably Christie’s most profound description of a murderer, one who displayed “the handiwork of someone who had accepted evil” and lived in perpetual suffering. (It’s surprising nobody quotes Othello).

Michael, who seems very polite for a man who’s spent most of his adult life in prison, will be reprieved. Miss Marple, Nemesis Victrix, will have the £20k paid into her current account and may even indulge in a whole partridge.

It is possible, especially for a newcomer to Christie, that the ambling and rambling style of Nemesis might be off-putting. It’s not exactly innovative, but it seems highly appropriate for the twilight of Miss Marple’s career. (Any attempt to construct a plausible chronology would have her around the age of 94, as the events of Nemesis occur within two years of A Caribbean Mystery). Moreover, the slower pace allows for more consideration of character and the warped psychologies that might lie behind criminal acts. Clotilde, the victim of her own terrible love, is almost a tragic figure and Nemesis one of the finest later Christies.

Sophy, 23 and pretty, works for the firm that published Grant. On holiday in Rome, she joins one of Mailer’s exclusive and expensive Il Cicerone tours. Alleyn, apparently hunting a drug-pusher, also signs up. Others on the tour include Baron and Baroness Van der Veghel, big and Dutch; Lady Braceley and her nephew Kenneth (obvious homosexual) are dissolute.

The Basilica of San Tommaso stands on layers of history. Grant’s novel, Simon in Latium, was set partly in the Basilica and a major scene concerns the ancient stream 60ft below the surface. Violetta, a postcard vendor, hisses and spits at Mailer. The Veghels resemble Etruscan sculpture. The Baron takes snapshots of the party, which descends into the pre-Christian levels. It is very dark, two floors down. Lady Braceley retreats and therefore ascends.

Grant, on tap as part of the tour, talks of Mithras. Major Sweet, an old-school bore, inveighs against religion. The Baroness insists on a tableau of the party gathering around a statue and ‘listening’ to Grant reading from his novel. It takes quite a while as she has to replace a bulb. Sophy wonders if walls absorb emotions. Grant quotes Lear (not, to The Reader’s surprise, Macbeth). Mailer has vanished.

The Questore (Head Roman policeman) thinks Mailer has bolted. The Dominicans in charge of the basilica think Violetta has history with Mailer. Grant is taking to Sophy. Alleyn helpfully explains the plot in a letter to Troy. He assumes that Mailer is a link in the heroin trade but admits to confusion regarding the other members of the tour, suspecting that Grant is being coerced and baffled by the Major.

At an exclusive nitespot, Alleyn gently introduces the topic of drugs to Kenneth. This is pursued at Toni’s, a dodgy joint at which they witness a ‘Keenky Keeks’ show. Alleyn buys some heroin and cocaine from a porter, who assures him that it comes from Mailer’s stock. Back at the hotel, Grant tells Sophy about the loss and return of his Simon in Latium manuscript. He recalls, for the benefit of the reader because she must already know, the plagiarism suit he lost over his first novel (albeit with minimal damages). The Baron tells the Baroness he had an appointment with Mailer that the latter did not keep, thereby relieving his anxiety.

Alleyn and the Questore find Violetta’s body in the sarcophagus, two levels below the basilica. Alleyn finds in Mailer’s flat good evidence for drug-running and blackmail. He, as the Anglophone, then does his classic where-were-you with the other tour members. Sophy recalls noises as of a murder and sarcophagus lid being moved. (If only she’d noticed at the time). Alleyn, who is doing very well for a man who must be over 70 in strict chronology, than tails Giovanni, Mailer’s henchman, to a rendezvous with the Major. There is talk of ‘arrangements.’ Grant tells Alleyn of Mailer’s blackmail.

The Major is spying on Mailer for Ziegfeldt, the drug lord, but actually attempting a double-cross by blackmailing Giovanni on his own account. Lady Braceley was also blackmailed by Giovanni to prevent Kenneth’s arrest. Mailer supplied Kenneth. Back in London, Fox helpfully finds that (the fake) Major is wanted on fraud and narcotics charges. Also that Kenneth is a bad lot.

The Dominicans lower Alleyn to the bottom of the well where it meets the stream… and where he finds Mailer’s body, caught in the broken grille. He was strangled and pitched down the well. Unlike the police, whom he rather deprecates, Alleyn takes photos of the body. Violetta was hit then strangled, Mailer probably likewise. Even if Mailer killed Violetta, he probably didn’t put her body in the sarcophagus. This is confusing.

The Major, watched on and by all sides, flees under cover of student riots and is hit by a van. Giovanni helpfully tells the police that the Major killed Mailer. The Major dies, so cannot deny it. The police are happy with this solution.

Alleyn, however, found a letter in Mailer’s flat written in Dutch. The Baron translates. It is a reply to an inquiry about the Baroness, providing the information that she is a permanent invalid who lives in retirement. This prompted the blackmail, for reasons he doesn’t divulge. Alleyn lets him go, reflecting that he is “the nicest murderer I have met.”

Alleyn writes to Troy, explaining that their ears suggest the Baron and Baroness are closely related, probably half-siblings. The Baroness faffed around with a camera long enough to give the Baron to meet Mailer and pay the blackmail; he found Mailer and Violetta’s corpse, killed Mailer, pitched the body into the well and put Violetta into the sarcophagus to point the finger at the absent Mailer. Only – and rather conveniently – a snapshot of Kenneth’s proved that he wasn’t in the Baroness’ tableau.

There are excellent points about When in Rome. Firstly, the location is new and interesting and obviates the need for chapters of witness statements. Secondly, the murderer gets away with it, which is new for Marsh. The Reader has not once grasped the physical details of the crimes in Marsh’s novels and this is no exception; even so, the murder seems a tiny bit implausible, especially the disposal of the bodies. That quibble aside, it’s highly recommended.

Passenger to Frankfurt (1970) might best be described as an entertainment, even as a jeu d’esprit. The author’s Introduction promises a ‘fantasy built on headlines.’

The flight of Sir Stafford Nye, maverick diplomat, is diverted to Frankfurt where a strange young woman asks to borrow his passport and distinctive hooded cloak so that she can go to London and not be killed. He accepts.

‘Security’ has at least noticed that his passport went through Heathrow after it was ‘stolen.’ Someone claiming to be from the laundry has taken two of his suits and snooped in his flat. Horsham (of the Service) knows that Daphne, aka Mary-Ann, used the passport and promptly vanished. The passport is returned to Stafford in the pages of Lifeboat magazine. Twice he is nearly run over. This is intriguing and an engaging opening.

Colonel Pikeaway (last seen in Cat Among the Pigeons) of the Service knows everything and trusts Stafford, who places a ‘Passenger to Frankfurt’ ad in the newspapers. It pays dividends: a mysterious woman palms him a Festival Hall ticket on Hungerford Bridge. Daphne/Mary-Ann sits next to him, but they don’t speak bar her request to borrow his programme. When he gets home, he finds that she switched his programme for one with Siegfried’s motif pencilled in.

Stafford’s ancient aunt, Lady Matilda, directs him to a portrait of his Hungarian ancestress, whom Daphne resembled sufficiently to pass immigration at Heathrow. The Reader reflects that this couldn’t happen any more and is slightly regretful, despite it probably being for the best. Matilda sees historical patterns; The Youth are being directed towards destruction ‘in a good cause,’ “everyone’s worried” and nobody knows who’s really behind it. ‘The Young Siegfried’ seems to be a key phrase.

At the US Embassy for dinner, Stafford is seated opposite Daphne aka Countess Reneta Zerkowski. The ambassador’s wife is a ‘pocket Venus’ who wants a world “quite, quite different.” The Countess (aka Daphne, Mary-Ann) offers him a lift and kidnaps him to a mock-Tudor house near Godalming, which turns out to be the dwelling of Mr Robinson (last seen in At Bertram’s Hotel and one of the few people to occupy both Poirot and Marple universes). Also in attendance are Horsham, ancient Lord Altemount and his faithful hound Sir James, who discourse on patterns in history. Stafford has been recruited precisely because he doesn’t take himself too seriously. The Reader thinks this principle ought never to have been abandoned. The Mysterious Villain is promoting Youth to be against things and encouraging “violence for the love of violence.”

Book Two finds Renata (as she shall henceforth be known) taking Stafford to an enormous and enormously wealthy woman in a Bavarian Schloss. She has a magnificent ‘youth corps’, part Swiss Guards and part choral singers. The Young Siegfried (beauty, strength, arrogance) arrives and is saluted with ‘Heil, Franz Joseph!’ The Reader begins to suspect a Nazi element. Charlotte, the Schloss owner, seems to be the Bond villain: immensely wealthy, a worshipper of Youth and of paradise obtained through destruction. She was also at school with Stafford’s Aunt Matilda.

Franz Joseph addresses an adoring crowd in the Dolomites. He has Hitlerian charisma; “Nothing mattered but to feel.” Stafford sees it as mere ‘pasteboard’ and infers a producer further behind the scenes. “One gets very tired of universities,” he says. “They repeat themselves so much.”

Book Three launches us unexpectedly into a French Cabinet meeting, interrupted by ‘the Marshal’ (presumably a De Gaulle stand-in) who apparently takes control. In C14, even more unexpectedly, a character uses the phrase “arseing around.” Students hold territory in Italy and France and much of the world is ablaze. The British, quite phlegmatic about the whole thing, don’t know the source of the unrest / violent insurrection. We learn of Charlotte that “her father owned the vast Krapp yards in Germany.” The Reader no longer knows what to think. Pikeaway has a few names and a Venn Diagram, which is nice.

Lady Matilda goes to Bavaria for a ‘cure.’ Her room includes paperbacks by Fanon, Marcuse and Levi-Strauss, so the whole thing is clearly a locus of Evil. Her nurse-companion is Amy Leatheran, who surely can’t be the same woman from Murder in Mesopotamia? She never mentions it…

Matilda entices an invitation from Charlotte, who enthuses about the Order of the Death’s Head. Matilda feigns interest on Stafford’s behalf. Pikeaway considers the heads of young firebrands; “stuffed full they are of German philosophy,” not reckoned to be a good thing. Dr Reichardt tells the Cabinet that Hitler checked himself into an asylum towards the end of the war, replaced for public purposes by a madman who thinks he’s Hitler; was smuggled to the Argentine – where’s Hastings when you need him? – and had a son, the Young Siegfried. “Once the pleasures of evil get a hold on you, you cannot draw back.” How true. (It’s not impossible, to be clear).

Pikeaway knows the Young Siegfried isn’t Hitler’s son. It was his real birth certificate Renata was carrying at Frankfurt Airport. Back in his London flat, Stafford entertains three ‘idealistic’ young men and promptly tells Pikeaway. Admiral Blunt talks to Matilda about mutual friend Robbie Shoreham, genius, and his Project Benvo. A random professor tells Renata that Shoreham destroyed the records. A deputation goes to Scotland where he tells them that ‘artificial benevolence’ is ‘against God.’ Sir James turns out to be the Judas and the (late) ambassador’s wife, posing as a nurse, the Evil Genius. It seems as though Benvo will be dusted off and the world (presumably) saved.

Stafford and Renata will marry.

Passenger to Frankfurt is to Christie novels what Quantum of Solace is to Bond films. It does read as though it were written through the medium of a game of Consequences, or like one of the ‘collaborative’ Detection Club novels in which different authors wrote successive chapters. The plot is Buchan in one of his sillier modes and the whole thing makes very little sense.

There is a degree of ‘hush Agatha, take your pills’ yet reactionary comments of 1970 seem all too prescient in this Year of Our Lord 2026. It’s nonsense, but it’s quite entertaining nonsense.

Miss Lottie Cambric, owner of The Turrets, and Miss Perdita Browning (no relation), drill Rupert Campion, drama student, on his new job as Burbage, the butler. He is assaulted by a mysterious man sneaking around the grounds. Campion (the original) receives a mysterious plea for help from The Turrets. Corkran, his Service friend, is bothered by the disappearance of Vasily Kopeck, a mysterious Russian.

Dinner at The Turrets is spoiled by the ‘guests’ demanding information on the whereabouts of Kopeck. Led by Mr Nascott, it is searched to no apparent effect. Nascott is a ‘private inquiry’ agent whom Campion beards in his lair. He thinks he’s being employed by a certain [i.e. Soviet] embassy. He also thinks that Lottie is being pressed to sell by a contractor, Denmark Holdings. Meanwhile, the weekend chef at The Turrets appears to have cut his throat, leaving a note: ‘poor bloody fools. You know less than nothing.’

Campion and Nascott have the same idea about Kopeck’s whereabouts, an Aircraft Research Station at Baxstable (somewhere in the North). Nascott nods off in the pub and Campion acquires his booty, a tape recording of Kopeck apparently rehearsing a speech.

A lovely evening at The Turrets is spoiled by the disappearance of Felix, Lottie’s expert on old books and possible forger. Lottie admits that Kopeck ‘banked’ money with her, was then ‘hidden’ in Baxstable, then removed by Felix when Nascott took an interest, but she has no idea as to his current location. Campion track down Felix, The Reader thinks rather easily, to a hotel near Clacton called Wayland Hall. Felix told his kidnappers that Kopeck was at the Hall, but he left shortly before they arrived.

Hilary Wykes, employee of Denmark Holdings, is not very interested in Nascott’s information that the original owner’s fancy tomb at The Turrets contains a much newer body. ‘Mr Moryak,’ man from the [presumably Soviet] Embassy, comes to collect the body and finds only a skeleton, which Lottie says is that of a servant girl from 1895. Nascott buys some information in an East End pub regarding the identity of the contemporary corpse and, shortly afterwards, is shot.

Hetty Sims, Nascott’s employee and mole within Turrets, is approached by Wykes. Campion finds a classified advert by ‘Farthing Enterprises’ in ‘The Alembic,’ a scientific journal taken by Kopeck… and a kopeck is a coin of low value, just like a farthing. An MP on the payroll of Denmark Holdings raises the name of Kopeck in parliament, which engineers publicity. Lottie thinks Perdita warned Kopeck. She is sent from The Turrets as a precaution. Rupert also leaves. The publicity does nothing whatsoever for The Turrets. Campion’s attempt to respond to the Alembic ad at Liverpool St Station meets only with a note. Campion visits Nascott in hospital and buys two weeks’ silence with a nicely forged stamp.

Felix admits to accidentally killing the arsonist from C1, who turns out to be a small-time crook, and entombing the body. During a recital at The Turrets, an elm falls into the wall; it is found to have been assisted by gelignite. Campion persuades Wykes that it would be in their mutual interest if he, a skilled racing driver, acted as Campion’s chauffeur. Nascott is dead, having apparently propelled himself from a hospital window.

Campion and Wykes drive to an ancient church now occupied by Orthodox monks. Moryak and his vassals also turn up, from whom they escape… with Kopeck, who had been hiding as a monk. His Alembic (Farthing) contact, a British physicist called Lawn, has also disappeared. Moryak offers Kopeck a choice: elevated status and all the facilities he could want or ignominy and the responsibility for unleashing an unspecified ‘peril.’ Perdita and Rupert return to The Turrets just in time, having bought and brought a copy of Lawn’s work. Kopeck allows Moryak to take a photo of the Lawn cuttings. It seems as though the Soviets have accidentally discovered a ‘deathwish’ drug and Lawn can provide an antidote. All’s well that ends well.

It’s an interesting and not entirely satisfying yarn. The subject matter is late Allingham and the narrative a good simulacrum of her style, but it lacks her humour and plot strands are left lying around waiting to be tidied.

Hallowe’en Party (1969) finds Ariadne Oliver failing to help with a Hallowe’en Party at Apple Trees, the house of Rowena Drake, friend of Ariadne’s friend Judith Butler (not that Judith Butler, thankfully). She is present when 13yo Joyce Reynolds says she once saw a murder. The party goes well thanks to highly competent Mrs Drake, widow.

Ariadne comes to see Poirot and tells him that Joyce was drowned in an apple-bobbing bucket. Nobody believed her (‘I didn’t know at the time it was a murder’) and yet she was killed very shortly after. In the library. A body, in the library.

Poirot goes to see ex-Superintendent Spence, last seen in Mrs McGinty’s Dead, who has retired to Woodleigh Common. He doesn’t see an obvious suspect but will make inquiries. “A human error is nothing to what a computer can do if it tries,” Ariadne mutters prophetically. Rowena Drake is mildly annoyed at the solecism of being murdered in her house. She didn’t take Joyce seriously; she was a girl who “liked to show off.” Mrs Reynolds is not the competent type. Her bluestocking older sister Ann and sneaky swotty younger brother Leopold didn’t believe her either.

Elspeth, Spence’s sister, thinks that Joyce habitually lied. Regarding recent deaths, Mrs Llewellyn-Smythe of Quarry House died a little suddenly… Olga the au pair girl was suspected of forging a codicil to the will and promptly disappeared. Charlotte Benfield was a 16yo murder victim. Lesley Ferrier, forger and lawyer’s clerk, was stabbed to death. Janet White, teacher, was strangled.

Dr Ferguson is chosen to speak for the author on the detrimental effect of closing asylums and the increased use of ‘psychiatrists’ reports’ in the criminal justice system.

Miss Elizabeth Whitaker, teacher, saw Rowena on the staircase when she gave a start and dropped a vase. Water and glass everywhere. The Reader is surprised that literally nobody else at the party seems to have noticed. Elizabeth thinks Rowena, looking in the direction of the library door, saw something. She also thinks the late Janet White and her friend Nora Ambrose, now in The North, were ‘over-sexed.’

Mrs Llewellyn-Smythe hired Michael Garfield to create a garden in Quarry Woods. Poirot there meets Garfield, a beautiful (and arrogant) man who has created a beautiful space. He also meets Miranda Butler, resembling a wood-nymph, who tells him there was once a murder in the quarry. Miranda favours euthanasia over hammering nails into the skull. Judith is worried about something (and not merely Miranda’s slightly morbid speculations).

Solicitor to the late Mrs Llewellyn-Smythe tells Poirot that her money came to her nephew, Hugo Drake. He had sympathised with Olga but thought her guilty of fraud. And then she vanished. Rowena firmly denies seeing anyone leave the library. She and Poirot conduct an extended exchange about punishment and extenuation.

The local gravekeeper liked the late Hugo Drake, polio victim killed by a hit-and-run driver. “Nobody really likes people who are always doing their duty,” he says of Rowena. Teenagers Nick and Desmond, who helped at the party, think Leopold is awful (“he’s a sneak. He eavesdrops. Tells tales”). They seem to have read Allingham’s The Mind-Readers. They use queer to mean Lesbian (capital L in original), which is mildly interesting for those keeping track of linguistic convention. “There’s always got to be a sex background to all these things,” they assume.

Mrs Goodbody, who plays the witch at parties, doesn’t like the Reynolds children. She thinks Olga is ‘in the well.’ Mrs Leaman, requisite char, tells Ariadne that she witnessed the codicil Mrs Llewellyn-Smythe wrote and signed. Poirot and Ariadne have a vague conversation about dates, both fruit and temporal marker. He is concerned for Judith and Miranda. Mrs Leaman did not witness the forged codicil.

Poirot stumbles upon Michael drawing Miranda, who had been looking for the Well. There is speculation that Lesley forged the will for Olga. Mr Goby’s foreign service, which seems a very convenient manner of expediting a plot, discovers that letters from Olga ceased eighteen moths previously.

Leopold is found dead, drowned in a local brook. Rowena tells Poirot that it was Leopold she saw in the library. It is inferred that he must have known the murderer. Poirot tells Ariadne to bring Judith and Miranda to safety in London. He convinces the police to conduct some ‘forestry’ in Quarry Wood. Having stopped for lunch en route to London, Miranda escapes for a rendezvous with a grey-bearded man in a car. Olga’s body is found in the Well; she was knifed.

Miranda’s contact takes her to Kitterbury Ring, site of ancient sacrifice. She is to be a (willing) sacrifice because she told Joyce something she once saw, which led to her death. Fortunately, before she takes the Fatal Draught the sacrifice is prevented by Desmond and Nick, who have been tailing The Man.

A couple of years previously, whilst up a tree in Quarry Wood she saw a man and a woman carrying a body. She realised it had been a murder more recently, when she saw the same man and woman talking about their imminent departure to a Greek island. The couple was Rowena and Michael, who deliberately forged the codicil and murdered Olga to ensure that she inherited from her aunt-by-marriage. Michael, who drinks the Fatal Draught, turns out to be Miranda’s father. Rowena spilt the vase over herself to account for the fact that she was already wet.

It’s an odd and slightly eerie novel. The murder of Joyce, albeit psychologically plausible, strains credulity; would nobody have noticed until enough time had passed to make everyone suspect? That said, Hallowe’en Party is an engaging late Christie, especially when it’s remembered that the author was in her late seventies.

Aunt Ada dies shortly afterwards. On their return to Sunny Ridge, Tuppence likes a painting of a little pink house given to Aunt Ada by Mrs Lancaster, partly because she thinks she’s seen the house in real life. Mrs Lancaster’s ‘people,’ the Johnsons, have removed her and proved to be elusive. Tuppence’s thumbs prick; Tommy thinks she’s imagining things due to a need for excitement. Tuppence remembers she saw the pink house from a train window; Tommy goes off to a Secret Conference. Albert – still in their service after forty years – mentions measles and Tuppence has a Proustian reaction about the likely location of the pink house, so she goes off to find it.

Having found it, she meets its inhabitants: ‘friendly witch’ Alice Perry and her slightly slow husband Amos. The house is divided lengthways. Rescuing a jackdaw in the other half of the house, they find a child’s doll that had been shoved up the chimney. The vicar of Sutton Chancellor, whom Tuppence finds looking for a child’s grave, knows the house; Miss (‘Nellie’) Bligh knows everything about the parish. Tuppence stays with Mrs Copleigh, a fund of (mis)information who tells her about Mr Boscowan, the painter, and Lilian Charrington, a local girl who ‘got into trouble.’ The locality experienced a spate of child murders about twenty years ago, which The Reader thinks might have registered with the Beresfords at the time.

Sir Philip Starke, widower, recluse and possible suspect, once lived in the local big house. He mostly lives abroad and Miss Bligh, his former secretary, keeps the house in order. Market Basing house agents are unhelpful. Tuppence finds a tombstone marked ‘Lily Waters’… and is knocked out.

“Don’t like all these earnest middle-aged women you meet nowadays, all got a Cause with a capital C” says a minor character to Tommy. Tuppence doesn’t return. Dr Murray did a post-mortem on Mrs Moody of Sunny Ridge and found that she died of a morphine overdose. The Reader is sure that Dr Murray didn’t need to tell Tommy who wrote Macbeth. (And also that Ngaio Marsh must have been kicking herself that Christie got in first with the title).

Ivor Smith, old (Secret) Service friend of Tommy thinks Eccles, solicitor to the Johnsons, is a criminal mastermind. Mrs Boscowan, widow of the painter, recognises the painting and identifies the location as Sutton Chancellor. Somebody, not Boscowan, has added to the painting a boat under a bridge. Tuppence wakes in Market Basing hospital and gives her maiden name, which is published in a newspaper (‘does anyone have information about…’) and helpfully read by Deborah, their daughter, who phones Tommy. That’s a very convenient plot device. Tommy and Albert discover a secret drawer in Aunt Ada’s desk and finds a note she left indicating her suspicion of criminal activity, and possibly poisoning, at Sunny Ridge.

The doll that had been stuffed up the chimney turns out to be stuffed with diamonds. The ‘grave’ of Lily Waters turns out to be a stash of loot from various robberies. Sir Philip and Mrs Boscowan join the Beresfords at the Sutton Chancellor vicarage. The boat added to the painting was named ‘Waterlily’. Tuppence thinks Sir Philip, who tells her his wife died in 1938, is like a haunted El Greco. Smith is closing in on the robbery-and-loot-disposal side of the business. The Irish Mail is mentioned, which makes The Reader wonder if the plot of At Bertram’s Hotel has been borrowed for the book (or, conceivably, if it’s the same criminal organisation).

The memory of a letter at the vicarage addressed to ‘Mrs Yorke’ leads Tuppence, in a burst of inspiration, to intuit that Miss Bligh is Mrs Johnson. Returning to the Perrys’ house, she finds it deserted apart from… Mrs Lancaster! Who is living in the secret part of the house, mainly because she’s the now-slightly-demented child-killer and mass poisoner, shuttled from place to place by Miss Bligh as an act of devotion to Sir Philip, whose wife ‘Mrs Lancaster’ is. In her early life she was a wonderful dancer who went to the bad, became known as ‘Killer Kate,’ and was very nearly rescued by Sir Philip. What seems to have tipped her over the edge was guilt at an abortion, which is quite dark for Christie. She felt impelled to ‘send the innocent to heaven’ as a sacrifice, then obviously later in life had to kill anyone she imagined might Know Something.

The novel meanders a little, and it probably isn’t worth dwelling on the details, but it’s a cracking good story that really suits Tommy and Tuppence. It’s also slightly unnerving, not least because of the ‘was it your poor child’ motif and Christie’s willingness to consider the presence of Evil.

The Allingham Case-Book (1969) is a collection of Allingham short stories, some several decades old, published not long after her death.

‘Tall Story’ is Charlie Luke’s account of his entrance to the CID. A man has been shot and the police cannot figure out how the culprit got rid of the gun; Luke spots a newly-posted bill covering a hole in the brickwork where he usually stashes his sandwiches.

‘Three is a Lucky Number’ finds Ronald planning the ‘accidental’ death of a third wife. Edyth, however, is not such a fool as all that.

‘The Villa Marie Celeste’ is the house in Chestnut Grove from which a young couple has vanished. Campion infers that good news permitted the couple to flee the oppressive presence of her family; indeed, the postman delivered a £75k pools win.

‘The Psychologist’ is Adelbert, at least so he describes himself when he lights cigarettes with Louise’s debt repayments. The police, being better psychologists, figure out that he’s producing counterfeit currency.

‘Little Miss Know-All’ is Melanie, prize-winner of a memory contest, who steals her own mink coat with the unwitting assistance of a bored husband (not hers) who has two addresses and the initials HJ at both.

‘One Morning They’ll Hang Him’ refers to the nephew of old Mrs Cibber, who is deemed to have shot her at two minutes past midnight after an earlier row. In fact, both parties were inclined to row and reconcile; it was Miss Smith the companion who shot her for the inheritance.

‘The Lieabout’ is a tramp who guys the narrator into becoming an unwitting accomplice for (and beneficiary of) a stylish jewel robbery.

‘Face Value’ concerns the murder of Mrs Parish. Her husband is given an alibi by Sir Theo, who insists that he never forgets a face. Campion seems unsure and The Reader is frankly confused.

‘Evidence in Camera’ is the case of murdered redheads in coastal towns every New Moon. A grubby little press photographer is on the case.

‘Joke Over’ concerns Mr Miller, business owner, who appears to have vanished into the Fourth Dimension. He has done no such thing, in fact, but turns out to be a dentist grown weary of his increasingly serious Other Life.

‘The Lying-In-State’ is a whimsical but highly implausible tale of an impoverished aristocrat getting one over on his ex-wife by fooling a hotel manager.

‘The Pro and the Con’ finds Campion in Monte Carlo and very surprised to see Margaret Buntingworth. He suspects she has let her house to a pair of crooks, but on his arrival to investigate finds that the crooks may be on the receiving end.

‘Is There a Doctor in the House?’ demonstrates to DC Macfall that he should never, ever, think for himself.

‘The Border-Line Case’ is an apparently impossible murder solved when Campion realises that a policeman moved a body from his jurisdiction to the next.

‘They Never Get Caught’ concerns Henry Brownrigg, unpleasant chemist, who wants to be rid of his wife Maisie. He carefully doses her with pills containing digitalin, but she is careful to stage his suicide when he is incapacitated after his weekly binge.

‘The Mind’s Eye Mystery’ is that of Judy, who has unfortunately fallen in love with Laurie who, when he was a child, is supposed to have shot her aunt. Dorinda was a bit of a goer and was in fact shot by a lately-deceased painter. The Reader feels that the police would probably have explored this angle at the time.

‘Mum Knows Best’ sees a fancy piece abscond with the diamonds of a fond old gentleman. Most implausibly, Charlie Luke’s mother picks her out from seventeen diamond-clad women as a wrong ‘un.

‘The Snapdragon and the C.I.D.’ is a murder case complicated by ancient Lady Larradine, who is attempting to return jewels to their owner after they were stolen by an inhabitant of her home for distressed and eccentric gentlefolk.

These rather brief descriptions should not be taken as criticism of a pleasant collection, merely an assessment of their relative importance in the canon. They would be best taken like a vitamin supplement, one a day with a cup of tea.

Having thrown his job in Hamburg, Mike attends the public auction at which the reserve price is not met. Walking up through the wood, he meets Ellie, real name Fenella. She is also warned off by Mrs Lee, who is so disturbed that she returns the five shillings with which Ellie crossed her palm. Ellie and Mike date even though she is extremely rich. She has Greta, a German who organises. Mike and Ellie ‘make believe’ about their future and Mike is disappointed to find that Gipsy’s Acre has been sold privately.

Mike’s mother is suspicious. Ellie saw the Santonix house in France and bought Gipsy’s Acre. Fenella Guteman is one of America’s richest women. Santonix is worried that Mike “hasn’t grown up.” Mike and Ellie, who has just turned 21, marry in hugger-mugger.

Book Two opens with Mike slightly shocked by the casual assumptions of The Rich. Santonix seems to have been made more arrogant by impending Death. Andrew Lippincott, Ellie’s lawyer, gently grills Mike and suggests a loosening of Greta’s influence on Ellie. Greta is a beautiful (and efficient) Nordic blonde who is nonetheless slightly frightened by Santonix. Mike has to learn how to be rich, made more difficult because members of Ellie’s family – avaricious stepmother Cora, flakey Uncle Frank – are unpleasant. Mike is slightly jealous of Greta.

Santonix has built an excellent house at Gipsy’s Acre but warns Ellie that “there are some bad people around you.” A stone is thrown through the window. Major Phillpot JP, known locally as God, feels slightly responsible for Mrs Lee as she once saved his brother from drowning. A note is left, skewered to a dead bird with a knife, warning Mike and Ellie to “get out of here if you know what’s good for you.”

Major Phillpot invites them to lunch, where they meet Claudia Hardcastle. She enjoys riding and was once briefly married to an older American called Lloyd. Ellie accompanies herself on a guitar, singing William Blake: “some are born to Sweet Delight / Some are born to Endless Night.’

Ellie and Mike discover and restore the property’s Folly. Ellie sprains her ankle, so Greta moves in. She and Mike argue; he tells her she’s bossy and interfering. Ellie buys a horse, calling it Conquest. It is a good horse. Ellie and Claudia often ride together and use the same allergy tablets. Mrs Lee threatens Greta with a curse. Being a thorough women, she then tells Ellie that “it’s Death standing by you and it’s Death will have you.” Nobody could accuse Mrs Lee of a softly-softly approach.

Santonix tells Mike that Greta has “taken possession! You won’t get rid of her now.” He fears Mike is now the outsider. “I want the house I built purged of evil,” he implores, without specifying its source. Mike’s mother turns up, having already been visited by Ellie unbeknownst to Mike. She likes Ellie but is vaguely displeased. Mike sends her a cheque, which she refuses with a note: “you’ll never be different. I know that now, heaven help you.”

Mike accompanies Phillpot to a sale and buys a papier mâché desk for Ellie, who doesn’t join them for lunch. This is because she is dead. She is found by the edge of the woods, having fallen from Conquest yet not been killed by the fall.

Book Three opens with the inquest, in which Dr Shaw gives ‘heart failure’ as cause of death. Greta confirms that Ellie was known to have a ‘weak heart.’ Mrs Lee, who may have been seen in the area on the Fatal Morning and who ought to have been at the inquest, has disappeared. It is suggested that someone paid her to frighten Ellie. Another message comes through the window by means of a stone: ‘it was a woman that killed your wife.’ Mike shows Phillpot, who is unimpressed.

The police find a gold lighter, marked with a letter C, at the Folly. Claudia admits that she was married to Ellie’s banker, Stanford Lloyd. “The world is a very evil place,” says Andrew Lippincott. Most of Ellie’s family, including Lloyd, seems to have been in the area on the Fatal Day. In the aftermath of the funeral, most of them try to rook Mike. Whilst he’s in New York, Mrs Lee is found dead in a disused quarry and Claudia is found dead, thrown from her horse. Mike transfers financial responsibility from Lloyd to Andrew as the latter is more honest. Mike goes to Santonix’s deathbed; his final words are “you damned fool… why didn’t you go the other way?” Mike returns to Gipsy’s Acre.

At this point, almost exactly 90% of the way through the narrative, The Reader discovers that All Is Not As It Seems.

Endless Night is not one of Christie’s better-known novels, so it’s worth withholding an account of the last 10% in case you have the chance to read it for yourself. It’s a stunning conclusion to a very good book, which proved that Christie, by now in her late seventies, remained the Mistress of Mystery. And the sense of evil that permeates the book is thoroughly unsettling.

Clutch of Constables (1968) has, most unusually, a framing device, which is a retrospective lecture given by Alleyn to the Police College. The case involved Troy who, on a last-minute whim, took a vacated berth on MV [Motor Vessel] Zodiac for a five-day river cruise.

Her fellow passengers include Hazel Rickerby-Carrick, arch; Caley Bard, flirtatious; Dr Natouche, gracious with “warmly dark” skin; Stan Pollock, an obvious racist; Earl and Sally-Lou Hewson, American siblings, and Rev Lazenby, an Australian clergyman. Mrs & Mrs Tretheway and their son Tom crew the Zodiac.

Alleyn tells us that the Bondian villain is Foljambe aka the Jampot. Troy exclaims “the place is swarming with Constables!”, meaning the painter, and senses that somebody was very still in response. Troy’s perspective on ‘the race issue’ is worth quoting (1968, remember):

“I consider that one of the worst features of the whole black-white thing is that nobody can say ‘I don’t much like black people’ as they might say ‘I don’t like the Southern Scot or the Welsh or antipodeans or the Midland English or Americans or the League of British Loyalists or The Readers’ Digest’… until people who are or who are not attracted can say so unselfconsciously it’ll go on being a muddle.”

Two motorbikes seem to be following the Zodiac. Foam on the river is detergent from a nearby factory. The last-minute cancellation, Andropolus, has been killed in Soho. Alleyn (in the narrative) is in the US, so Fox suggests Troy check in with the police at Tollardwark (pron. Toll’ark). Their checks seem to clear the passengers. Miss Rickerby-Carrick (henceforth R-C) disturbs Troy in the night. Lazenby retrieves R-C’s diary when she drops it in the river. Troy thinks he’s detached some pages.

An insight into the diary reveals that R-C overheard something extraordinary in Toll’ark but the next pages have been torn out. She wants to confide in Troy but Lazenby appears. Troy wakes the following morning to find that R-C has disappeared. A message left with the lockmaster indicates that she’s gone to visit a sick friend (but who, Troy wonders, told her in the middle of the night?) Dr Natouche is concerned that R-C was ‘overwrought.’ The Longminster Police find no record of a taxi collecting R-C. The Hewsons go crazy buying junk and may accidentally have unearthed a Constable. A telegram arrives for the Tretheways from R-C in Carlisle.

On the return voyage, however, Troy sees R-C’s face, ‘idiotically bloated,’in the foam at Ramsdyke Weir. And faints, understandably. Police find that the body was weighted down with her own suitcase. Her ‘Faberge charm’ has disappeared from around her neck. The corpse was found seven miles upstream from where she was supposed to have left the Zodiac…

Alleyn, bothered by Troy’s letters and suspecting the Jampot, returns from America. Clues on the scene include footprints, tyre marks and a scrap of pyjamas. Troy is persuaded to leave the Zodiac. The Hewsons blatantly lie to Alleyn about the whereabouts of the ‘Constable,’ claiming they sent it on. Jo Bagg, the dealer in whose emporium the Constable was found, is fed up with motorcyclists. The Hewsons had visited him the previous month.

Evidence indicates that the body was strapped to a motorbike rider, driven upstream, weighted and dumped. Alleyn concludes that R-C was killed because of what she overheard. He suspects that the Hewsons are in a forgery racket and that the fake Constables are ‘salted’ by the motorcyclists. His doodles suggest that Pollock painted the fake. The motorcyclists, who have been picked up in Pontefract with the Faberge, seem to have worked on Tom, who is 15yo and open to being impressed by mildly rebellious cool.

The male motorcyclist, name of Smith, dumped the corpse and sped to Carlisle to send a telegram in the name of R-C. In ‘The Creeper,’ the river fog, Miss Hewson attempts to bolt and is killed in a nearby field (the site of a mediaeval meeting-place, incidentally). Dr Natouche’s account of his movements is not corroborated by any of the other four men…

…and then the real Caley Bard, supposedly in South America, is brought on deck by the police. The fake Caley Bard is, of course, Foljambe.

The conversation R-C overheard between Lazenby, Pollock and Foljambe related mostly to Andropolus, who attempted to blackmail Foljambe and was consequently killed. R-C struggled to recall the name to Troy before Lazenby intervened. R-C was given a ‘massive barbiturate,’ one of Miss Hewson’s little pills, before Foljambe executed his plan by killing her and handing the body over to Smith.

The narrative device adds a pleasingly stereo effect to proceedings. It stops being a proper whodunit about halfway through, which removes the need for chapters of interviews with Alleyn and Fox and thus makes it sufficiently different to be distinctly entertaining. It is also a pleasure to have Troy, an appealing character, at the centre of events.

Sunday is about Art. It’s ostensibly about Seurat, but it’s really about Art and the Artist. It’s always a danger to have Artists write about Artists as Artists are so terribly inclined to think the world of Artists. Sunday doesn’t really engage me, although there are two excellent songs for Seurat’s model and muse, and it leaves me totally cold in the second half. The essential number from the show was ‘Art Isn’t Easy,’ which prompted Mark Steyn to sniff, “oh, yes, it is, compared with craft.”

(But the Devil whoops, as he whooped of old: “It’s clever, but is it Art?” – Kipling)

Into the Woods actively bothers me because it represents that deeply annoying trend of ‘seeing through’ (deconstructing) other people’s work, the point of which can only be to demonstrate your own cleverness. Perhaps I’m too heavily influenced by Jonathan Pageau, but fairy tales are too deep and rich to be ‘reworked,’ even by a genius like Sondheim. (As Disney has discovered, to its financial embarrassment). And that leaves Assassins, so we’ll leave Assassins.

We love Sondheim, no doubt about it. We’re just going to Move On.

So what are we going to do now? I thought we might look at an under-appreciated lyricist, who wrote the following:

“Has no-one told you I’m a classical figure?

Did no-one notice that I’m semi-divine?

Hercules, I grant you, had a number of labours,

But if we were neighbours

They would have been mine.”

And

“Somehow suddenly you simply seem to say

Te amo, te quiero me amor”

And

“From this moment on your say-so

I got roses all the way, so

When you tell me life can be so

That is good enough for me, so

When they ask about romance are

You my final answer?”

And

“It was good when it lasted

But now the young bastard

Has grown

And he’ll know where the breaks are

Now all the mistakes are

His own”

And

“He’s something of a night-owl

That’s not how I roll

He’s always using my towel

- The fluffy one I stole”

I could go on. I could go on more or less for ever, because I’m quoting myself. I am not, however, yet prepared to devote an entire monthly essay to my own brilliance (which may be why I don’t have thousands of subscribers on Substack).

If by chance you are interested in learning more about my lyrics, do let me know and I’ll be happy to oblige.

We could look at Walter Kerr, notoriously harsh theatre critic, who wrote a few good lyrics himself (or at least, he was listed as one of the lyricists on Goldilocks):

“I can’t be in love

I can’t be in love

For the record I am (a) unsteady (b) unready (c) unavailable at certain busy seasons.

I am poor and immature and unemployed and then besides I have my reasons.”

But, as a writer, Kerr is not really worth our time until we start scraping the bottom of the barrel sometime in the 2030s. John LaTouche, on the other hand, is a writer of genius, taken far too young at the age of 41. The Golden Apple is regarded as one of the great unappreciated Broadway shows and I like a song of which I have possibly the only copy in the UK (not because I’m special, just because nobody knows it):

“When one is young one is so unstrung

There’s no time to exercise prudence

One bumps along through the merry throng

Til the heart has suffered a few dents

I put a special man by

Just in case of a storm ahead

I thought that he would stand by

Did he stand me up instead?”

But let’s look at Bloom & Vlastnik’s 101 Greatest. We haven’t covered one of the historically most important Broadway shows, Shuffle Along, which ought to have had a major centennial in May 2021 but didn’t. We haven’t covered Hair, because I just can’t. We haven’t covered The Merry Widow because operetta isn’t my wheelhouse, as the kids say. If only there were a great musical that was the Broadway equivalent of Dominic Thiem: one moment in the sun and then overshadowed by contemporaries.

Well…

Musical theatre wouldn’t be musical theatre if such a show didn’t exist. Its creator was a successful film composer who also worked, and occasionally starred, on radio and television. His secret project was a musical about his native state, which took him eight years, thirty – thirty! – revisions and forty – forty! – songs. And, the process of producing being more affordable in those days, it arrived on Broadway in December 1957 with a beautiful young female lead and a male lead whose experience in musicals was zero.

As I have told people in the past, Robert Preston was thirteenth choice for The Music Man. Or it may have been eleventh and it may have been for the film version – the point being that an opportunity is an opportunity, no matter how it arrives. The story goes that Cary Grant was offered the role and turned it down, saying “not only will I not play Hill but if Robert Preston doesn’t, I won’t go and see it!”

The story also goes that Cary Grant was offered the lead in the film version of My Fair Lady and turned it down, saying “not only will I not play Higgins but if Rex Harrison doesn’t, I won’t go and see it!”

One suspects that either one at least of these stories is apocryphal or Cary Grant knew he had a good line and intended to use it. (“Not only will I not play Fagin but if Ron Moody doesn’t, I won’t go and see it!” I made that one up).

Along with Professor Higgins, ‘Professor’ Harold Hill is a role I (if not Cary Grant) was born to play. It was a terrible oversight that I was never given one of his songs at AMDA. But anyway, the character is a charming fraud; as somebody pointed out quite recently on Substack, he manages to convince the townspeople of River City into a giant collective self-delusion that flatters their self-esteem, thus making Music Man (set in 1912) an extraordinarily prescient comment on twenty-first century society.

This may be over-thinking a tad: it’s not a ‘serious’ musical and we should pay more attention to the transformative power of the central romance between Hill and Marian the Librarian: “he lightens her and she deepens him” (Mordden), or she “has domesticated him, as it were” by the end of the show (Bloom & Vlastnik). This is how romance used to work. Happy days.

The Music Man begins as train noises segue neatly into the passengers’ conversation, salesmen all, who dismiss the chances of this fellow Hill who “doesn’t know the territory!” Which Hill, one of the passengers, takes as a challenge. And off we go, to a Rodgers and Hammerstein folk chorus passed through Bob Newhart:

“And we’re so by God stubborn
We could stand touchin’ noses
For a week at a time
And never see eye-to-eye”

And then Hill’s introduction, probably the second-best-known song from the show, which is all the more remarkable as it doesn’t really have a tune so much as a rhythm. It’s a great phony revival hymn in which Hill, a sort of pastiche Elmer Gantry, tells the good people that

“Ya got trouble,
Right here in River City!
With a capital “T”
And that rhymes with “P”
And that stands for Pool”

Fingering the pool hall as a den of iniquity (“that game with the fifteen numbered balls is a devil’s tool!”), Hill’s minatory exhortations are gloriously of the period:

“Watch for the tell-tale sign of corruption!
The moment your son leaves the house,
Does he rebuckle his knickerbockers below the knee?
Is there a nicotine stain on his index finger?
A dime novel hidden in the corn crib?”

Robert Preston keeping just the right side of camp. Who should have given way to Preston in the Oscar nominations: Burt Lancaster, Jack Lemmon, Marcello Mastroianni, Peter O’Toole or Gregory Peck?

‘Piano Lesson’ charmingly builds from basic scales practice to a minor dispute between Marian (the Librarian) and her mother, both eventually cramming in as many words as possible to melodies that aren’t really designed for them. And the number of phonemes Pert Kelton injects into “Oh? Who?” is remarkable in itself.

‘Goodnight My Someone’ is Marian’s ‘I Want’ song; she’s ready for romance but there doesn’t seem to be anyone available in River City. The individual ‘someone’ is, for the moment, a 2D cut-out from – well, from the sort of musical Barbara Cook had been in hitherto. Her mother suggests that she’s educated herself out of the market by reading Balzac (and ‘other Greeks’), a sly poke at the clash of small towns and civic improvement. As a quick sidebar, note also that Hill doesn’t have an ‘I Want’ song, because he’s a huckster and why would he?

And then

And then

The other song that had a life outside the show despite making very little sense outside the show. It won’t be very often that you hear a performer at a piano bar offer you his own version of ‘Seventy-Six Trombones,’ as much as I’d like Aaron Tveit to do so.

“Seventy-six trombones led the big parade
With a hundred and ten cornets close at hand.
They were followed by rows and rows of the finest virtuosos -
The cream of ev’ry famous band”

That’s thinking big, as befits the character. And I love the internal rhyme.

Kudos to The King’s Academy, Florida, whoever you are

Hill is in the great tradition of lupine young (or youngish) men tamed by better woman. Also in the great tradition, he gets a pre-conversion song about the joys of freedom / liberty / licence [delete according to taste]. This is morally debatable, but without it literature would be seriously etiolated.

“I flinch, I shy, when the lass with the delicate air goes by
I smile, I grin, when the gal with a touch of sin walks in.
I hope, I pray, for Hester to win just one more “A”
The sadder-but-wiser girl’s the girl for me.”

Acting Tip #137: when in doubt, do something with your hat

Would any lyricist, these days, expect the audience to understand the literary reference?

He’s met his match in Marian (the Librarian), but she too has stepped outside the conventions. She’s too bright, to be honest, and is suspect because of the local philanthropist:

“He left River City the Library building
But he left all the books to her”

As the city gossips cheerfully inform Hill. Moreover, she advocates ‘dirty books’: Chaucer, Rabelais, Balzac!

In this (slightly demented) clip from the 1962 film adaptation, the great Hermione Gingold contrives to make ‘Balzac’ sound the utter depths of degradation. It also gives some indication of the superhuman charm that made Robert Preston a Broadway legend.

It’s difficult to imagine Preston originating the role of Henry II in The Lion in Winter, but he did. It’s difficult, albeit not impossible, to imagine Peter O’Toole in The Music Man.

‘Marian the Librarian’ is written in the bass clef, appropriate for the sotto voce tone required to pay court in a Quiet Zone:

“It’s a long lost cause I can never win
For the civilized world accepts as unforgivable sin
Any talking out loud with any librarian
Such as Marian…”

If you’re trying to persuade an uncommunicative librarian to talk to you, it’s very useful if you threaten to drop some marbles.

‘My White Knight’ is interesting because it has only one rhyming verse, the rest of the lyrics being more naturalistic, more stream-of-consciousness, than is usual. ‘The Wells Fargo Wagon’ is a very jolly first-half closer that conjures up the excitement of seeing the 1912 equivalent of a community Amazon delivery.

“O-ho the Wells Fargo Wagon is a-comin’ down the street.
Oh, don’t let him pass my door!
O-ho the Wells Fargo Wagon is a-comin’ down the street
I wish I knew what he was comin’ for.”

You can get a ‘salmon from Seattle’ or ‘a grapefruit from Tampa.’ This is, in fact, the great American economy in action. In 1918, the Wilson Administration forced all domestic delivery (‘express’) companies to consolidate. This is the warmth of collectivism in action.

If you type ‘Shipoopi’ into the YouTube search engine, the first suggestion is the word alone. The third suggestion is ‘shipoopi the music man.’ The second suggestion is ‘shipoopi family guy,’ in one of its flights of genius:

And then you get a barbershop quartet, ‘Lida Rose,’ and then one of the most annoying six-note phrases in all musical theatre, ‘Gary, Indiana,’ which sticks irritatingly in the mind in a way unworthy of its eponym. To be fair to both the City of Gary and Meredith Willson, Gary was only six years old in 1912 and a vision of the future; in 1957, not that anybody could have known, it had just about reached its peak. (The city lost 61% of its population between the census of 1960 and the census of 2020).

The final song achieved a small and unrepeatable niche as the only Broadway number ever recorded by the Beatles:

“There were bells on the hill
But I never heard them ringing,
No, I never heard them at all
Till there was you.

There were birds in the sky
But I never saw them winging
No, I never saw them at all
Till there was you”

It’s a classic form for a love song – AABA – with the quirk that there’s only one rhyme, the second line in each A-section, which binds the song. You might think that ‘winging’ is there only because it rhymes with ‘ringing’ (and, you will have correctly predicted, ‘singing’). That’s not quite fair; winging is an unusual word but one with a poetic quality. If we use the word at all, it would be literally (‘see the geese, winging their way home’) or metaphorically (‘your gift is winging its way to you as we speak’) or possibly both, if you have given someone a goose. Either way, it suggests the swoop of birds going from A to B; subtly, therefore, an anthropomorphic image is introduced that makes regrettable Marian’s lack of awareness.

And it rhymes with ‘ringing.’ After all, she was never going to claim that ‘there were bees in the air / But I never felt them stinging / No, I never felt them at all / Till there was you.’

We love Barbara Cook, the original Marian

The famous finale, which is either musical theatre magic or a piece of legerdemain depending on your point of view, finds the band coming to life (and to expertise) in the eyes of those who love them. Possibly we could from this draw a moral about the transformative nature of finding true love, as with Harold and Marian. Heck, it’s a musical comedy, albeit one with more “sheer vivacity of invention” (Mordden) than most.

The Music Man beat West Side Story to the Tony for Best Musical, which is more like The Godfather beating Cabaret than The Greatest Show on Earth beating High Noon. These being the days when musicals could be written and produced within a single lifetime, Music Man was still running when Willson’s next musical opened on Broadway in December 1960. The Unsinkable Molly Brown was the story of Margaret Brown, who did not go down with the Titanic. The Titanic isn’t actually the story, which concerns the go-getting attitude of a frontier American gal in Colorado, but it does provide a good hook for the title. The star was Tammy Grimes, a “hellion with allure” who carried the show. John Kenrick described her as “whisky-voiced,” but he was outdone by Bloom & Vlastnik, who wrote that she had “an immediately identifiable voice halfway between the purr of a minx and the gurgle of a drain.”

Personally, I think this voice was perfectly suited to Elvira, the ghostess with the mostess, in High Spirits. No video, alas, but here she is ganging up with Ruth (Louise Troy) on their husband Charles (Edward Woodward).

The score is full of “fetchingly strange pieces” (Mordden), not many of which made it into the canon. Molly’s ‘I Want’ song began the show:

“You’ll see me carried shoulder high,
By famous people I’ve never met,
But till I leave the rear,
It’s from the rear you’ll hear,
‘I ain’t down yet’”

If musical theatre had a single commandment, it would be some version of Don’t Quit.

‘I Ain’t Down Yet’ was followed by a song for Molly and the sort of male chorus that, according to Broadway, Won the West. These are hard-drinking miners:

“Belly up, belly up to the bar, boys
Let your money be seen
Only drink by day or night
Or somewheres in between”

Even I sometimes wonder if Broadway could be corporately charged with misinformation. If only General Custer had deployed better choreographers.

Molly Brown was a hit and spawned a film adaptation, for which Debbie Reynolds nabbed an Oscar nomination. Not one of the year’s more subtle performances:

If your knowledge of American history was based on musicals, you’d assume the biggest industry on the frontier was clothes-dyeing

Willson’s next (and, as it turned out, last) Broadway show wasn’t a hit, although it ran nine months. Here’s Love was an adaptation of Miracle on 34^th Street and included a song Willson had written some years previously, ‘It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas,’ which is a very shrewd use of material. It otherwise made no impact whatsoever as, according to Mordden, “Willson’s work had deteriorated amazingly” and the songs were “boring.” The title song is mildly enlivening (“from the lamb to the lion, from the eagle to the dove / Here’s Love”), even if it does sound a little like it doesn’t have the courage to be Tom Lehrer:

“But during
National Brotherhood Week, National Brotherhood Week
New Yorkers love the Puerto Ricans cause it’s very chic”

And that was it for Willson on Broadway. His next effort was a musical about Columbus and Isabella, 1491, which sank in San Francisco. Take it away, Ken Mandelbaum:

“Except for the sets, costumes, and leads, no-one liked anything about it… it was carried out without wit or excitement… surprisingly lacking in good tunes.”

Ah, well. We’ll always have River City.

Ariadne goes to 67 Borodene Mansions to find Norma, only to find Claudia Reece-Holland (first girl), who works for Norma’s father, Andrew. Neither she nor Frances Cary (second girl) admit to Norma being lost. Poirot goes to the Restarick house, Crosshedges, in Long Basing. Mary Restarick, South African, seems slightly out of place. She is vexed by her poor relationship with Norma and more vexed by finding the decorative David Baker wandering round the house. Poirot convinces Sir Roderick they both worked in Intelligence. He has an efficient and foreign secretary, Sonia.

Poirot gives David a life back to London. Norma has been missing for four days, to widespread unconcern. Questions arise: is Mary being poisoned? Who is Sonia? (what is she?) Poirot concludes he found ‘nothing’ at Crosshedges, which – being Poirot – he considers very interesting. Mr Goby has a story of Norman being found with a revolver at Borodene Mansions. He also has the backstory, in which Andrew left his wife when Norma was five and has returned from Africa only recently. There is a general sense that Norma is ‘wanting.’ Frances found a stained flick-knife, now removed, in Norma’s drawer.

Ariadne blags her way into 67 and chats to the cheery char. It is revealed that a woman recently threw herself out of 76. She tails Claudia, to no effect, then fortuitously finds Norma and David in a café. He is concerned that she’s mental and offers to marry her. She ‘hates’ Andrew and Mary. Weedkiller was found in her drawer and she can’t remember about the knife. Ariadne alerts Poirot, who talks to Norma. She may be crazy and/or may want to be. he is upset that Andrew has changed in fifteen years’ absence, to which Poirot responds that “people are never alike what you remember them.” The Reader is surprised that Poirot inserted an unnecessary ‘what’ into that sentence. Norma says she is unaware of her actions and Poirot wonders if she might ‘like the idea’ of being mad.

Ariadne, who had tailed David to a World’s End backstreet, tells him she was doing ‘research’ for her next book. David takes her to his studio, where Peter is painting Frances. Attempting to find her way back to the King’s Road, Ariadne is coshed. Elsewhere in London, young Dr Stillingfleet saves Norma from being hit by a Jaguar. He suspects it may have been attempted self-harm. Norma doesn’t want to be found. Her mother hated Louise, the woman for whom her father left them (and with whom he did not long remain). Stillingfleet informs an unknown other that he has ‘kidnapped’ Norma to a rehab clinic.

Poirot goes to see Andrew Restarick with his (apparently forged) letter of inquiry. Andrew tells him of life in Africa and how Mary was being fed arsenic, presumably by Norma. Ariadne, in hospital, insists she was coshed by a peacock. Sir Roderick is missing some papers and Mr Goby recognises Sonia as a contact of a man from the Hertzoslovakian [sic] Embassy. Poirot thinks “there are too many patterns,” which disappoints Ariadne. He is very excited when she tells him about the Borodene Mansions suicide: “this must be the murder.”

Sonia comes to tell Poirot, for no obvious reason, that she didn’t take the papers. The manager of Borodene Mansions tells him that the late Mrs Louise Charpentier was a fretful, dissipated, unhappy middle-aged woman. Chief Inspector Neele, whom The Reader naturally hopes is from A Pocket Full of Rye, confirms the immense Restarick wealth. Claudia’s father, an MP, was a casual lover of Louise (by no means the only one). Ariadne again scolds Poirot for getting nowhere and The Reader is beginning to sympathise.

Miss Battersby, Norma’s former Headmistress, thought her mother self-righteous, censorious and stupid and Norma distinctly average but not likely to suffer from mental instability. Poirot senses genuine Evil and Danger. Andrew is willing to pay off David if David is willing to be paid off. Poirot “felt sure” that the Louise of Borodene Mansions was the Louise for whom Andrew left his wife. After some contemplation, “quite suddenly… it was all there” for Poirot.

Norma walks out on Stillingfleet after seeing a message in the Personal Columns. Frances returns to 67 to find David stabbed to death. Miss Jacobs from next door finds Norma standing against the wall holding a knife. Stillingfleet pronounces Norma sane; she had in fact been doped in a manner very reminiscent of Molly in A Caribbean Mystery. The Reader appreciates that Christie was in her 70s and could be forgiven for recycling good ideas. Poirot reveals that Mary Restarick and Frances Cary are the same person and that Andrew Restarick is an imposter. Louise obviously had to be killed because she would have known the difference.

Third Girl is a really interesting plot spoiled by sluggish development and a remarkable flurry of surprises, the combination of which is enjoyable but slightly incoherent. Sir Roderick’s papers, it turns out, were simply mislaid. And surely Norma, however well doped and however good the wig, would have noticed that her flatmate and stepmother were the same woman?

Cargo of Eagles (1968) was completed by Philip Youngman Carter from notes left by his late wife, Margery Allingham. The Reader’s rather nice Hogarth Press edition gives her year of death as 1968 rather than 1966, which seems a trifle careless.

Campion and a young American historian, Morty, are (for different reasons) interested in Saltey, a hamlet on the Essex flats known as ‘London’s eastern exit.’ Campion tells Morty to look out for old lag James Teague and a tall man with a glass eye. Superintendent Oates (retired) helpfully reminds Campion that Teague was jailed for murder and piracy; recently released, he has vanished. His old conspirator ‘Target’ Burrows is also thought to be at large. Saltey has ‘native mischief’ that may or may not be connected.

Dr Dido Jones, whom Morty fancies, has been bequeathed The Hollies, a property in Saltey, by a geriatric ex-patient. She has been receiving poison-pen letters ever since. Teague’s wallet is found hidden in the Swallow Café, near Dido’s hospital. Teague’s disappearance seems to have been carefully planned.

Miss Kytie, the bequeather, liked to play with people’s expectations in Saltey. Jonah Woodrose seems the leading candidate for disappointment. Morty takes Dido on the back roads to Saltey and is delayed by a contretemps between a van and motorcycle, the latter piloted by a young woman. At The Hollies, they find Hector the Solicitor dead, shot with a pistol between 5 and 6pm.

Morty and Lugg sit in The Demon, a pub named after a fabricated local legend. Lugg speaks of the mysterious death of the undertaker two years previously, found among his own coffins having failed to collect an actual corpse. Lugg’s acquaintance at the local morgue says Horace was killed with a pre-war ‘Silver Prince’ bullet, a mark of Teague.

Wishart, The Demon’s landlord and minor poet, tells Morty of the confected ‘tourist version’ that covered up incompetence with some mild property damage. Never, he tells Morty, ignore “the basic human delight in doing evil if the opportunity to do so undetected occurs.” PC Sibley is apprehended and tied up overnight. Stones hitting the weathercock suggests that ‘Target’ is back in town.

Monica Weatherby, the local stringer, thinks the letters are from various people whom she can identify from the contents. Saltey is an old entrepôt for smugglers. That may be the wrong word but The Reader hasn’t had the chance to use the word entrepôt since A-level Geography. Monica has no problem with smuggling in general but thinks Saltey is now being used for dope-running, “and that I simply will not have” as they are “works of the devil.”

Morty deals neatly with a Mod (possibly a Rocker) and is chatted up by Doll, biker from the aforementioned crash. She shows him an old figurehead in a barn as a means of seduction, but somebody knocks him out. Doll’s identification of the assailant matches ‘Target.’ Campion says that Teague must not be caught. The Reader begins to lose track of the plot.

Jonah Woodrose has vanished. His house was broken-into-and-entered and Jonah himself possibly abstracted. Campion and Morty find him in the ‘ghost town’ left by Edwardian property speculation. Mossy, an ancient villager, is found dead. Campion thinks he may have been a little too vocal in The Demon about seeing a ghost. The Reader is sure that this is slightly more chaotic than a true Allingham novel.

Wishart wrote the poison-pen letters as a literary squib, but a new and apparently genuine threat to Dido has frightened him. London and the local police compare notes, wondering where the hoodlums fit in. Mods and Rockers flood The Demon on Whit Saturday. A fight with the locals leads to a fire at the coffin shop. Someone broke into The Demon’s secret cellar, presumably the same people who desecrated tombs in the church. It is assumed they didn’t find what they wanted.

Oates tracks down Teague, who seems to have retired. Campion wonders if someone is impersonating him. Campion talks to his old friend in the Secret Service, who has big fish to fry. Time is running out. Campion’s phone message to him is Matthew 24:28. (The Author doesn’t quote the verse, so The Reader looked it up: ‘For wheresoever the carcase is, there will the eagles be gathered together.’ The NIV replaces eagles with vultures, which makes no sense at all for the plot. Be it noted that you should always check which Bible translation is at work).

Men from the Service come to Saltey, posing as surveyors. An ambush in the middle of the night snares Doll just before she stabs Dido. Doll turns out to be Teague’s daughter, who ‘raised the ghost’ of Teague and Burrows. She used the Mods / Rockers to do a little reconnaissance and a little diverting and a little violence and a little drug-running. Campion lifts a section of floor in The Hollies, which reveals fake heating pipes that are actually concealing a secret cellar. This cellar contains the corpse of ‘Target.’ Beneath the corpse, Campion and Lugg found £100k-worth of twenty-dollar gold pieces, or ‘double eagles.’

The story turns out to be one of unofficial official bribery during the war, piracy and theft by Teague and Burrows, and the immediate need for cash to spring an unacknowledged agent behind the Curtain. The Reader couldn’t possibly have known this, but it’s all very satisfying. Allingham enjoyed the espionage genre and Carter, despite the slightly incoherent narrative, did a good job.

Scotland Yard can’t see who’s running The Concern behind large-scale robberies. One very small clue is the misidentification of Mr Justice Ludgrove at the scene of a crime. Miss Marple is concerned that time has frozen at Bertram’s. Bess declines the Colonel’s suggestion that she meet Elvira, her daughter, merely because they’re briefly at the same hotel. Bess also seems to know the commissionaire, Micky Gorman, who has “not forgotten Ballygowlan.” Elvira and Miss Marple both overheard the fenestral conversation. The Reader is delighted at being able to use the word fenestral.

Elvira tells her friend Bridget that she needs 24 hours to visit Ireland and convinces her to act as an accomplice in theft and fraud. In the Army and Navy Stores, Miss Marple ‘overhears’ Bess and Ladislaus engaged in a mysterious conversation. Having mistaken the date, the canon doesn’t go to Lucerne. On his return to Bertram’s in the early hours, he is surprised by something we are not told.

C8 records the exceptionally efficient, effective and bloodless robbery of the Irish Mail train and dispersal of the proceeds. Elvira “hoped something wasn’t true, but it is true” in Ireland. She tells Bridget she’ll “have to be careful.” She goes to her solicitor and learns that she is heir to the £600k fortune of Lord Coniston, her father. The solicitor warns the Colonel about a shadowy boyfriend, which the Colonel cannot believe, but it remains true that Elvira wants to know who gets the money if she dies before she’s 21.

The canon’s housekeeper is concerned by his disappearance. The Treader appreciates the Chesterton reference, although the housekeeper says Crewe when she means Market Harborough. His guest the Archdeacon traces the canon’s known movements and concludes that it’s a police matter.

Miss Marple observes Elvira and Ladislaus in Battersea Park and notes his car’s registration plate, FAN 2266, because it reminds her of Cousin Fanny, who stuttered. Chief Inspector Davy and Inspector Campbell go to Bertram’s, where they disconcert Humfries and the imperturbable Miss Gorringe. Bertram’s is ‘absolutely above suspicion,’ which is a very useful reputation to have, as Davy avers to Miss Marple. She tells him that she awoke at 3 a.m. and, feeling a bit nervous, looked out into the corridor to see the canon leave his room and go downstairs. Davy questions Rose the chambermaid, who is uncertain as to the whereabouts of the canon’s airport bag. The Reader wonders why she just doesn’t deny that he ever returned to Bertram’s.

The canon wakes in Mrs Wheeling’s house in Milton St John, after being knocked down by a car (she says). A man resembling the canon, and a car with plates similar to Malinowski’s, were seen in close proximity to the Irish Mail robbery. The mysterious Mr Robinson tells Davy that the Hoffmann Brothers, financial wizards, are the real owners of Bertram’s. They are hands-off, crooked but legally so. The canon remembers nothing of the four days prior to his accident.

Davy sees FAN 2266 parked near Bertram’s. Miss Marple tells him about Ladislaus and Elvira. Bertram’s is ‘wrong,’ she concludes, fearing Evil and especially murder, which “defies God.” At which point Micky Gorman is shot and killed in the fog. Elvira says Micky took the bullet made for her. And somebody gave her some poisoned violet creams in Italy. No character in a detective novel should ever eat chocolates.

“Too many nice people,” mutters Davy, “who don’t know anything about evil.” Bridget confirms Elvira’s (a) emetic chocolates, (b) Italian boyfriend Guido, (c) Ladislaus, (d) trip to Ireland and (e) trip to the lawyers. The solicitor has little information for Davy and they wonder what would happen if Elvira were married. Gorman was shot with Ladislaus’ pistol and Ladislaus sort-of admits to being involved with both Bess and Elvira, the cad.

In a reconstruction, Miss Marple watches the real canon leave his room. It wasn’t he whom she saw, which confirms Davy’s (slightly plucked-from-the-air) belief that the canon was coshed on his return to Bertram’s and impersonated. Bess was – very briefly – married to Gorman, which suggests that Ladislaus shot him.

Bertram’s is “the headquarters of one of the best and biggest crime syndicates,” run by Bess Sedgwick! She claims to have killed Gorman, then she runs away and fatally crashes her car. Miss Marple knows who really shot him… Elvira!! She thought Bess’ subsequent bigamous marriages would abrogate her inheritance, which she needed to buy Ladislaus. There is an interestingly uncertain ending, in which Davy admits he has no evidence but roars to Miss Marple that he’s not “going to let her get away with it.”

Mark Campbell (in the Pocket Guide) isn’t keen, calling At Bertram’s Hotel “curious and slow-moving” and the murder “incidental.” If you know that in advance and adjust expectations accordingly, it’s a really well-spun and absorbing Christie.

Margery Allingham died on 30 June 1966, aged 62. The book on which she was working was completed by her husband, Philip Youngman Carter.

Death at the Dolphin was first published in the US in 1966 under the ridiculous title Killer Dolphin. Strictly speaking, the next title chronologically should be another Christie but variety is more interesting so we’ll stick with Marsh.

Mr Peregrine Jay, of the Unicorn Theatre, views the unused Dolphin Theatre on the south bank of the Thames. He falls through a hole in the stage and is rescued by a very rich man and his chauffeur, who take him to the former’s well-appointed residence. The very rich man turns out to be Vassily Conducis, who owns the Dolphin and, as it happens, a glove belonging to Hamnet Shakespeare. C2 finds Mr Greenslade, acting for Conducis, offering Peregrine the Dolphin to manage. (But not, to be clear, because he’s a homosexual. He isn’t).

Six months later, Peregrine is directing his own play, The Glove, set and costume design by his flatmate Jeremy. (Also, implausibly, not homosexual). The V&A decide the glove is genuine. Conducis wants W. Hartly (‘Harry’) Grove in the cast. The table reading goes well despite Peregrine’s more-than-usually emetic directorial guff, although at least he doesn’t call everyone ‘darling.’ Marcus (Shakespeare) greatly dislikes Harry (Mr WH). The company party is roiled by drunken undercurrents.

Gertie (Ann) annoys with her Method. Harry annoys with his sallies. The temperaments seem to be regarded as standard operating procedure for actors, which can only make rehearsals exhausting. Conducis decides the glove will be displayed in the theatre, which will be excellent PR. Harry seems strangely familiar with Conducis. (But not because he’s a homosexual. He isn’t). Destiny (Dark Lady) has no brain but great magnetism. Perry likes Emily (Joan). “Talent only fluctuates about its own middle line,” he suggests, whereas genius “is nearly always lacking in taste.” The Reader is prepared to consider this interesting essay prompt.

Emily quite likes Jeremy’s devotion to period design but allows Perry a “single famished kiss.” Almost everybody says ‘safely stowed’ at some point. Alleyn, specifically requested, oversees security and the display of the glove. The Glove gets good reviews.

Six months later, Trevor (Hamnet) annoys Jobbins (caretaker) by hanging around after performances, the precocious little brat. Perry and Emily return to the theatre after dinner, just past midnight, to find Jobbins killed by a brass dolphin, Trevor unconscious in the stalls and the display case rifled or at least empty, The Reader not being entirely sure what actions qualify as rifling. Alleyn, in a quite extraordinary line, “hadn’t been so disgruntled since he took a trip to Cape Town with a homicidal pervert.”

Hawkins the nightwatchman arrived just after midnight, saw Jobbins in the Circle wearing a very loud coat, went to make tea and returned to find a corpse. Evidence suggests that Trevor was flung over the balustrade, dragging his fingers along the fabric. The glove is found in the stalls. The sergeant in the ambulance helpfully cleaned Trevor’s nails, confirming the supposition. The obvious code to the display case – based, with stupefying myopia, on the word ‘glove’ – was never changed. An interview with the cast reveals that Charles Random (Dr Hall), quiet homosexual with a liking for second-hand books and difficult crosswords, cracked the code. The Reader, remembering Have His Carcase, thinks that codes are very complicated and surprisingly easy to crack by characters in detective novels. Trevor claimed to know the code but Charles think it was swank.

Harry, socially insecure, gave his loud coat to Jobbins. Conducis saw the play from his box. He and Harry have some mysterious connection. Marcus heartily dislikes Harry. Alleyn thinks the thief-turned-murderer must have donned the coat to fool Hawkins. Jeremy substituted an excellent copy for the original glove, which was technically theft.

There is mention of a Mrs Constantia Guzman, collector of antiquities and none too fussy about their provenance, who is a fan of Marcus and friend of Conducis. Perry talks Alleyn through the Company, which The Reader thinks could usefully have been done earlier in the narrative. Marcus is very touchy about Mrs Guzman. There is the obligatory Macbeth quote. Destiny adores telling Alleyn and Fox that she was slapped by jealous Marcus due to her ‘friendship’ with Conducis.

The bailiff from Surfeit of Lampreys turns up at Destiny’s, for no apparent reason beyond the inside joke. Trevor emerges from unconsciousness and is still annoying. Alleyn bothers Conducis by recalling the sinking of his yacht Kalliope, on which he acquired the glove. The parade of the cast into Trevor’s hospital room reveals that Gertie was haunting the theatre, yearning for Harry.

When Harry leans over Trevor, the boy wakes and screams. This seems a rather theatrical method of revealing the murderer, but there it is. There was a very small clue that indicated Harry’s guitar was in the theatre, ergo so was Harry, who was surprised in his theft and accidentally killed Jobbins, threw Trevor over the balustrade, pretended to be Jobbins, restored the coat to the corpse and left for a party in Chelsea, leaving the (fake) glove behind.

It turns out that Harry sold the glove to Conducis when he was a steward on Kalliope. When the yacht sank, Conducis prevented him from clambering into the life-raft and assumed he drowned. He did not drown, instead becoming a blackmailer, actor, thief and accidental killer.

Death at the Dolphin should be better. It’s a lovely set-up and, as ever with Marsh, the theatrical environment evocatively portrayed. The cast, however, is mostly huddled in the wings and the narrative begins to flag in the second act.