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A review by thecommonswings
Spor i sneen by Ngaio Marsh
5.0
I really wasn’t expecting much from this, and honestly it took until the crime happened for it really take hold for me, but I suspect that was always the plan. The central idea - the host of a country house party invites six people who in some way or other all viscerally hate each other just so he can see what happens and provide his rather gauche surrealist playwright friend with some new material - is great, but at first it’s all laid on a bit thick. Especially when the great alibi breaker is a moment that John Dickson Carr would have made a grotesque one, but Marsh instead makes *genuinely* surreal (as opposed to Mandrake’s rather forced efforts): the titular footman is so carried away by hearing Roll Out the Barrel he does a little dance. It’s a beautifully strange moment and almost completely transforms the novel
Because what we get next is like some sort of fever dream of a book: relationships implode and are remoulded; unexpected characters breakdown in varying levels of weirdness; and Mandrake, our sort of narrator, has an almost existential rebuilding of his self. It all culminates in a series of claustrophobic harried meetings with the suspects, and in the case of Mandrake and Chloris this happens during a huge thaw, which also mirrors what’s happening to the personalities of both characters
So when we finally get to Alleyn, about 2/3 of the way through the book, his role is less detective and more a calming influence on this wildly splintered characters. All that was broken begins to coalesce in new and surprising forms. That Alleyn’s sidekicks turn up with about two chapters to go must be, for regular readers of the author, been a kind of final sense of normality in the chaos: the end is now inevitable. Weirdly, and by god maybe it’s Mandrake who’s making me think like this, it reminds me of how long it took David Lynch to give us Dale Cooper in the third series of Twin Peaks. I’m not saying Marsh was thinking like that, and it certainly doesn’t head into wild despair for the final chapter, but there’s a sense of “FINALLY” about it which is one of the most tangible moments of pending justice in crime fiction I can remember. In this way it reminds me a lot of Kitchin’s Death of My Aunt
The solution is a bit convoluted, but the villain is suitably demented. There’s a real sense of dread in the last couple of chapters, of impending doom and it’s delivered in the unmasking of the villain. And it’s cleverly exactly who you thought would be either the victim or murderer when you first met them. Marsh absolutely harnesses that feeling and uses it as a way to bend the reader into wildly surprising new shapes. I’m not sure if I’m reading more into this than anyone else, and I probably am, but quietly this is one of the greatest golden age crime novels I can remember. Hugely impressed and hugely impressive
Because what we get next is like some sort of fever dream of a book: relationships implode and are remoulded; unexpected characters breakdown in varying levels of weirdness; and Mandrake, our sort of narrator, has an almost existential rebuilding of his self. It all culminates in a series of claustrophobic harried meetings with the suspects, and in the case of Mandrake and Chloris this happens during a huge thaw, which also mirrors what’s happening to the personalities of both characters
So when we finally get to Alleyn, about 2/3 of the way through the book, his role is less detective and more a calming influence on this wildly splintered characters. All that was broken begins to coalesce in new and surprising forms. That Alleyn’s sidekicks turn up with about two chapters to go must be, for regular readers of the author, been a kind of final sense of normality in the chaos: the end is now inevitable. Weirdly, and by god maybe it’s Mandrake who’s making me think like this, it reminds me of how long it took David Lynch to give us Dale Cooper in the third series of Twin Peaks. I’m not saying Marsh was thinking like that, and it certainly doesn’t head into wild despair for the final chapter, but there’s a sense of “FINALLY” about it which is one of the most tangible moments of pending justice in crime fiction I can remember. In this way it reminds me a lot of Kitchin’s Death of My Aunt
The solution is a bit convoluted, but the villain is suitably demented. There’s a real sense of dread in the last couple of chapters, of impending doom and it’s delivered in the unmasking of the villain. And it’s cleverly exactly who you thought would be either the victim or murderer when you first met them. Marsh absolutely harnesses that feeling and uses it as a way to bend the reader into wildly surprising new shapes. I’m not sure if I’m reading more into this than anyone else, and I probably am, but quietly this is one of the greatest golden age crime novels I can remember. Hugely impressed and hugely impressive