Ngaio Marsh (1895-1982) began writing Golden Age mysteries in 1934 and continued writing them right up to her death. Some of the later ones are excellent (see my reviews of Clutch of Constables and Light Thickens) and some are disappointing (Photo Finish). I think this one belongs in the latter category.
In this book, Superintendent Roderick Alleyn is – no surprise here – in Rome. He’s on the case of some international drug dealers and, in that role, he has been given an introduction to Valdarno, the Questore of Rome. Alleyn joins a tour group of visitors from England and the Netherlands, which is led by one Sebastian Miller, a man of dubious reputation, and features guest lectures by the famous author, Barnaby Grant. On the first day of the tour, during a visit to the Basilica of San Tommaso in Pallaria, Miller disappears. Is he dead? Has he run off? [There is a real San Tomasso in Parione located near the Piazza Navone, as the one in the book is, but actually Marsh has based her description of the basilica on the real Church of San Clemente al Laterano, a structure built of three levels: an 11th C basilica on top of a 4th C basilica on top of an underground 2nd C temple to the Etruscan god Mithras.]
Clearly Marsh had visited Rome, (she thanks the New Zealand Ambasssador to Rome and his wife, and their staff for their help), and was very impressed with the basilica; I’m sure it is amazing. But the book lingered there for much too long to keep my interest, even with Sebastian Miller going missing. The characters themselves were not very appealing: the writer Barnaby Grant and the young woman, Sophy Jason, who works for his publisher and is clearly destined to be a love interest, are the nicest of the group. The Baron and Baroness Van der Veghel, a Dutch couple who reside in Geneva, are sweet and a bit silly, and unfortunately say things like “my darlink.” And we are reminded too often that they resemble the Etruscan statues in the underground chambers. Major Sweet is a grumpy British stereotype, and Kenneth Dorne a dissolute drug addict. The cruelest descriptions are reserved for Dorne’s elderly aunt, Lady Braceley, who still fancies herself attractive to men: “More than the precariously maintained mask or the flabby underarm or the traitorous neck. It’s the legs…But the face was not too good either. Even if one discounted the ruches under the eyes and the eyes themselves, there was still that dreadfully slack mouth.” I noted in my review of Overture to Death that Marsh in her mid-40s was very harsh in her treatment of middle-aged spinsters; here she is at age 75 treating old women just as cruelly. The spinsters were sexually repressed and ‘holier-than-thou’; the elderly Lady Bracely is the opposite: “She has experienced everything, except poverty.”
Giving credit where it’s due, I have to say that Marsh did a fine job with the plot twist near the end and Alleyn’s final disposal of the case. And I liked Alleyn’s summation: “What was the position of a British investigator in Rome when a British subject of criminal propensities had almost certainly been murdered, possibly by another Briton, not impossibly by a Dutchman, not quite inconceivably by an Italian, on a property administered by an Irish order of Dominican monks?”
